GUNNISON, Colo.  The opening day of the two-day 2026 Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference Men's and Women's Indoor Track & Field Championships closed down Friday evening with Western Colorado men tied for third place in the team standings and the women in seventh place.

The Mountaineers picked up their highest individual finish on Friday in the men's pole vault where Brayden Jones equaled his career best height of 4.93-meters (16 feet-2.00 inches) to earn second place in the event.

Western added two more podium finishes on Day 1 as both the men's and women's distance medley relays earned top-three finishes.

The men's teaming of Gable Rial, Will Stone, Wyatt Hoover and Tyler Nord raced to a second-place finish with a time of 10 minutes, 9.41 seconds, a season best time and an improvement on an already provisional qualifying time for nationals.

In the next event, the quartet of Emma Kjellsen, Alissa Rall, Peyton Weiss and Lauren Willson combined for a third-place time of 11:57.50, also a season best and also an improvement of a provisional time that stood seventh on the NCAA Division II performance list.

The men's 400-meter dash added points to the men's team total. Jack Boyt finished fifth with a personal best of 49.67 seconds and Stone finished seventh with a season best 49.74.

Both the Western men and the women scored sixth-place individual finishes in the 5,000m run. Jan Thewes went first and finished sixth overall in the men's race in a time of 15:08.21, and then Annaka Rudolph followed with a sixth place in the women's race, crossing the finish in 18:27.00.

Scoring eighth place finishes for the Western women were Johanna Brown in the shot put with a best toss of 13.31m (11-2.50), and Aaleiah Porter-Gyll in the women's pole vault with a height of 3.42m (11-2.50).

In the women's multi event, Addisyn Sweeney scored a fifth-place finish in the pentathlon, her total of 3,195 points ranking fourth highest on Western's all-time indoor Top-10 list.

Preliminary heat results in the sprint events advanced three Mountaineers into their respective championship heats on Saturday.

Leading the way is Myia Dantzler who advanced into the finals of both the 60m and 200m dashes. She posted a prelims time of 24.81 seconds in the 200 for the second-fastest time of the day, and her time of 7.51 in the 60 will head into Saturday as the No. 4 seeded time.

Joseph Purbrick advanced to the championship heat of the men's 60m hurdles, his time of 8.26 the fifth fastest in the prelims.

And Arvell Amos made it to Saturday's championship heat of the men's 200, placing seventh overall in the prelims with a time of 22.18.

Saturday's schedule begins at 10 a.m. with the final events of the men's heptathlon, followed by a 10:30 a.m. start to field events and a noon start for the track events.