Track and field came into the weekend with high hopes, but it couldn’t reach its goals.

The Huskies set four NIU records and had three top five finishes to place 10th out of 12 teams at the MAC Indoor Championships Friday and Saturday in Kent, Ohio.

“This is a bittersweet moment in our MAC Championships history,” said head coach Connie Teaberry, according to a news release. “We closed out the second day with Latesha [Bigby] again adding huge points in the 60 hurdles and 60 meters, along with Claudette Day picking up needed points in the high jump and hurdles. These two ladies left it all on the track all weekend, and the staff could not have asked for more.

“We just missed out on eighth place. A difference of one point is hard for any coach to accept missing a place by when you know there were areas of underachievement. The talent is there. We have to keep pushing their desire to believe, but our direction up is clear.”

NIU accumulated 37 points, which is its second-highest indoor MAC total. Host Kent State won the conference title with 127.5 points, while Akron’s 98.5 points placed second and Eastern Michigan’s 91.5 points was good enough for third.

On Friday, the heptathlon girls got the ball rolling in the right direction as the three Huskies surpassed the previous total heptathlon point record that junior Michaela Dwyer set last season with 3,236 points.

Bigby finished with the most points and will be the name in the record books, but Teaberry said the three Huskies laid it all on the line for their team. Bigby took fourth with 3,835 points, which broke NIU’s previous record by nearly 600 points.

Day recorded 3,580 points, which was an eighth-place showing and broke the school record in the long jump with a leap of 18-09.25. Freshman Logan Tillmon placed 12th with a score of 3,243; her toss of 35-09.25 was just off her personal best, which allowed her to capture a fifth-place finish in that particular event.

Bigby and the heptathlon Huskies were not the only Huskies who notched their name among NIU’s best as the distance medley relay team made up by Ali Olson, Julianne Cronin, Hannah Savage and Meghan Heuer added its performance to the Huskie record book with its 11:35.03 for fourth place out of 12.

Saturday, former personal and program bests continued to fall. Day-one star Bigby continued to shine bright and earned third place out of 20 in the 60 hurdles with a time of 8.50; her time was one-hundredth of a second behind the NIU record. The hurdle performance also resulted in her receiving all-conference honors in the event.

A few moments later, Bigby returned for the 60 meters and ran a 7.57 to place fifth out of 20.

Heuer earned fourth place out of 20 in the mile, crossing the finish line at 4:53.60; the solid time happened despite a trip-up midway through the race.

Latesha Bigby, Rebecca Cronin, Tahtyana Peer and Julianne Cronin, in the last event of the championships, finished in eighth place in the 4-by-400 relay, a NIU record time of 3:47.15.