As the calendar rolls into the second week of May, the UBC Thunderbirds Track and Field program officially enters championship season with the Cascade Collegiate Conference meet set to begin this Friday, May 8 in La Grande, Oregon.

While there's much at stake and plenty to compete for at Eastern Oregon University this weekend, the T-Birds are primarily focussed on the bigger dance taking place two weeks from now in Asheville, North Carolina where the defending NAIA Champion men and women will look to defend their titles.

"Last year our men didn't win the conference championship but were national champions, and that's because we're not putting our top athletes, particularly in endurance events, in three different events just to try to win a conference championship and to get points that may result in fatigue or injury ten days later at the national championships," said UBC head coach, Laurier Primeau. "It's not that we don't value a conference championship, it's that we have our sights set beyond that and success at the national level is a more important factor, a more important goal for us than success at the conference level."



What is key for the CCC Championships, however, is for those athletes competing to put themselves in as good a position as possible to chase an NAIA banner. Everything from mental preparation on a big stage to tapering for ideal performance will be paramount.

A big advantage looking ahead to Asheville is the similarities La Grande provides in terms of climate and, even more importantly, altitude. Both locales are well over 2000 feet above sea level, La Grande at approximately 850 metres while Asheville sits at about 650 metres in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

"Championship competition is different than competing for personal and lifetime bests, particularly on the endurance side where those races become strategic," said Primeau who has guided the T-Birds women to four out of the last five Cascade conference titles. "Adding the element of altitude makes them even more strategic and personal bests almost go out the window for anything beyond 800 metres. Having said that, on the power-speed side, altitude is this massive opportunity with less air resistance and the potential for some lifetime bests in all but the endurance events."
 

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Those power-speed athletes which will compete for the blue and gold over the next several weeks boast perhaps the best such collection the Thunderbirds have ever produced. It's a further expansion of the team's overall diversity of disciplines which has also come to include a variety of jumps.

"It's not impossible to be competitive at the national level as a program with a singular emphasis but it's certainly a lot harder, so the diversity that we have is our strength. Our women are ranked number one in three out of the four jumps – in the triple jump, long jump, the pole vault, and we have a top ten performer in the high jump, and all four of them are different women. It's this depth and diversity that is really helpful to us and even allows us to focus more on nationals and allow rest and recovery to occur for some of our athletes at the conference level in the pursuit of bigger goals."

The focus as a group is more on the upcoming national championships but there's still plenty at stake for individual athletes in La Grande, especially those competing at this stage for the first time.

"We have the ability to use the conference meet for many as a stepping stone to the national championships. For others, it will be the final meet of the collegiate season for them and a place from which they can gain experience for coming years when we expect them to develop into national qualifiers."



The T-Bird women enter this weekend as defending conference champs while the men earned a third place finish in 2025, their fifth consecutive top-three performance.

Thanks to Sam McGee's fifth place in the conference decathlon last month as well as Alessandra Ionescu-Zanetti's fifth in the heptathlon, both the UBC men's and women's teams hold down four team points in the race for CCC banners.

The 2026 Cascade Collegiate Conference Championships get underway Friday afternoon at 1:00 p.m. with women's hammer throw in the field and the men's 5000 metre racewalk on the track. Live results will be available HERE.