BATON ROUGE – After wrapping up her prep career at Iowa’s Logan Magnolia Senior High School with a dominant performance at the Iowa Class 2A State Track & Field Championships, Alex Gochenour will now turn her attention toward the 2011 USA Junior Outdoor Championships next weekend where she looks to defend her national championship in the heptathlon.
Gochenour was the catalyst for Logan Magnolia’s state championship run May 19-21 as she captured four gold medals while scoring 40 points to lead a 71-69 victory over Hudson High School for the state crown.
While competing at Drake Stadium in Des Moines, which also served as the site of last weekend’s NCAA Division I Outdoor Track & Field Championships, Gochenour claimed Class 2A state titles in such events as the 100-meter dash, 200-meter dash, 100-meter hurdles and 400-meter hurdles. She actually set a Class 2A State Championships meet record with her winning time of 1:02.62 in the 400 hurdles.
In fact, this marks the second year in a row in which Gochenour has taken home four gold medals from an Iowa state meet as she also won each event with Logan Magnolia at the Class 1A level in 2010.
With her performance, Gochenour wrapped up one of the storied prep careers in the state of Iowa with her 13 career state titles at the Class 1A and Class 2A levels. That includes four-straight state titles for the 100 hurdles, three-straight in both the 100 meters and 400 hurdles and two-straight in the 200 meters.
Gochenour is now preparing to travel to Hayward Field in Eugene, Ore., next week as she competes in the heptathlon for the first time in 2011 at the USA Junior Outdoor Championships being held June 23-26.
Gochenour is the defending U.S. Junior gold medalist in the heptathlon as she is the nation’s No. 1 ranked recruit in the event for the Class of 2011. She scored a career-best 5,300 points to win the heptathlon gold medal at the 2010 USA Junior Outdoor Championships and earn the right to represent the United States in the event at the 2010 IAAF World Junior Championships held in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada.
Gochenour then scored 5,260 points at the IAAF World Junior Championships to finish in 10th place with her first career international competition. Her personal best of 5,300 points finished the 2010 campaign as the No. 1-ranked prep performance in the United States among all classifications.