KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Eight Goshen College student-athletes and six Maple Leaf entries are set for the NAIA outdoor track and field national championship after the NAIA posted the official qualifiers list Friday morning.

Four men and five women comprise Goshen's national contingent. The men — senior Jacob Gerber, junior Simon Graber Miller, sophomore Nelson Kemboi and senior Spencer Waterman — will all compete individually, while the women — senior Makayla Collier, freshman Summer Cooper, freshman Annika Fisher, freshman Hannah Kurtz and freshman Naomi Richer — will take part in the women's 4x800-meter relay with Cooper also competing in the women's 5,000-meter run.

All told, 1,133 athletes earned the right to compete at nationals, representing 114 women's teams and 112 men's teams. The three-day event begins next Wednesday, May 26, at Mickey Miller Blackwell Stadium in Gulf Shores, Alabama.

Gerber leads Goshen as the second seed in the men's hammer throw, where his mark of 203 feet, 8 inches (62.07 meters) earned him the Most Valuable Field Athlete plaque at the Crossroads League championship two weeks ago. He will compete in a field of 38 athletes in the event, which also leads off the event schedule for GC at 6 p.m. EDT next Wednesday.

Graber Miller enters the men's high jump as the seventh seed, having hit the qualifying standard at 6 feet, 9¾ inches (2.08 meters) at Indiana Tech on May 8. He is coming off an All-American performance when he took third place in the high jump at indoor nationals, clearing a GC-record 6-10¾, and also holds the outdoor record with his qualifying mark. There are 20 high jumpers entered in the event that begins at 5:30 p.m. next Thursday.

The women's relay team nabbed the 11th seed in the 4x800-meter relay, which covers a shade under 2 miles with each runner covering one-fourth of the distance. (GC has listed five runners in its entry so that one can serve as an alternate if another is unable to compete.) The quartet of Collier, Cooper, Fisher and Richer set the school record at 9:23.15 last weekend at the Fighting Chance Invitational hosted by St. Francis (Illinois). Twenty-one teams are entered in the event, which has trials at 8 p.m. Wednesday and a final at 8:10 p.m. Thursday.

On the individual side of the ledger, Cooper is the lone individual qualifier for the Goshen women, but she comes in on a high note, grabbing the 17th seed in a field of 26 runners with her mark of 17:38.00 at the Fighting Chance Invitational last weekend. She will cap the year with at least four school records and having competed at nationals in five events — three indoor, two outdoor — while declining to compete in another. The trials in the 5,000 are set for 8:45 p.m. Thursday and the final is Friday at 6:30 p.m.

Kemboi earned the 28th seed in the men's 5,000-meter run, where he posted a time of 14:53.05 to take fourth in the Strive for Greatness College Meet at Indiana Tech on April 23. He will shoot for a top-eight finish and his second All-American honor of the spring, as he also took one home from cross country nationals in April. Kemboi, a finalist in the indoor 3,000 as well, is one of 40 runners in the outdoor event, with trials set for 9:35 p.m. Thursday and the final to follow at 6:55 p.m. Friday.

Waterman is listed as the 29th seed in the men's marathon with a qualifying time of 2 hours, 41 minutes, 14 seconds; however, this is because most qualifiers use a half-marathon time for their seed and Waterman's full-marathon time from Des Moines, Iowa, in March is over a course that's twice as long as a half-marathon. A 2014 study by Dr. Andrew Vickers of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center showed that a runner's pace per mile slows by about 9.5 percent when moving from a half-marathon to the full 26.2-mile distance. Applying this correction to the half-marathon times, Waterman would be seeded 26th in the 30-runner field. At any rate, the national results are determined by an actual marathon and not by statisticians. The national marathon begins at 7 a.m. Friday morning.

The Maple Leafs will depart for Alabama early next week before competition begins on Wednesday. Stay tuned to GoLeafs.net for the latest developments in all 14 Maple Leaf sports.