The Shippensburg University men's indoor track & field team gets its 2022-23 season underway tonight with competition in the Bison Opener this weekend at Bucknell University.
 
After this weekend's Bison Opener, the Raiders will go on a hiatus from competition for seven weeks. SU will train and practice over the semester break before returning the week of January 16. That weekend features a scored meet at Bucknell, the Gulden Invitational, and signals the start of five straight weeks of intense competition leading up to the 2022 Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference (PSAC) Indoor Championships.
 
"Our training has been some of the best this fall that I have seen in a decade," head coach Dave Osanitsch said of his men's squad. "Our returning upperclassmen have done an outstanding job of showing the newcomers how we do things."
 
Shippensburg has won 11 straight Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference (PSAC) Indoor Championships. Last year, the Raiders became the third team in conference history to score a point in every event, joining the 2014 Raiders and the 2016 Raiders.
 
"We will be relying on the new arrivals to the team in our pursuit to continue our defense of the PSAC titles," Osanitsch said. "This team is balanced and ready to start the 2022-2023 campaign."
 
A whole host of integral veterans from the 2021 team have graduated, but, as Osanitsch mentioned, an influx of 19 newcomers (including 14 freshmen) have arrived to help.
 
"We needed to support certain areas of the squad to be more well-rounded, and I feel we did that," Osanitsch said. "We needed plug and play athletes and we got them. Now, they need to show us what they are capable of at the college level."
 
Another notable change this year is a new site for the 2022 indoor conference championships. The site is none other than Bucknell University's Gerhard Fieldhouse, the facility near and dear to the Raiders. Of the seven weekends of indoor competition for Shippensburg, five of those weekends will be at Bucknell.
 
Among the other particularly noteworthy meets of the season are Penn State's Sykes & Sabock Challenge (February 4) and a return to Boston University's Hemery Valentine Invitational (February 10-11). Boston is the site of SU's 4x400-meter relay team setting the all-time PSAC conference record in the event back in 2015.