As the Washington State track & field teams transition into the outdoor season, they continue to travel to bigger meets on the West Coast.

This weekend, 40 cougar runners will head to Stanford to compete in the 40th annual Stanford Invitational. Thirty more runners will head to Whitworth University in Spokane to take part in the Sam Adams Classic.

Fresh off the Texas Relays in Austin last week, freshman Alissa Brooks-Johnson said she is excited for the outdoor season after participating in her first collegiate heptathlon. She said she enjoys running outdoor more than indoor because of its familiarity.

“I wasn’t getting the same scores that I got in high school during indoor,” Brooks-Johnson said. “The first outdoor practice I immediately got back to my high school marks and just felt more comfortable.”

Despite being new to the heptathlon, Brooks-Johnson ranks No. 10 in the NCAA Regional Top 50 with 4,987 points. She has continued to adapt to participating in multiple events this year, and even though there is still work to be done, she is quickly asserting herself as an up-and-comer on WSU’s track team.

She said that while there is a lot of physical ability that goes into the heptathlon, the event is mainly mental.

“You have to mentally prepare yourself for each event,” Brooks-Johnson said. “Even if an event goes bad and you don’t like it, you have to brush it off because it can affect your next event.”

Brooks-Johnson also said she is getting more and more comfortable with the adaptation, even though it wasn’t until the end of the indoor season that she finally felt comfortable with her new position. She credits her technical improvement and confidence.

Heptathletes are different than the average track athlete because instead of focusing on one or two events, they have to focus on multiple and are focused on accumulating as many points as they can instead of focusing on times and placement.

Great coaching and team leadership has helped her gain the skills necessary to juggle all of the events she needs to compete in.

“She’s shown good resilience indoors and has had some great performances,” Head Coach Rick Sloan said. “She is a great competitor.”

Brooks-Johnson said Sloan is very technical in his coaching and likes everything to be perfect. She said she finds his style refreshing after coming from a 2B high school in Doty, Wash.

As the season goes on, Brooks-Johnson said she would like to be scoring somewhere between 5,000 and 5,200 points in the heptathlon and potentially even 5,300 to qualify for the Pac-12 Championships.