With only two weeks left before the Big Ten Championships, the Wisconsin women’s track team heads to Iowa this weekend for the Iowa Twilight meet, the second-to-last meet of the outdoor season.

Originally the team scheduled to split up and send the distance runners to the Stanford Invitational while the rest of the team went to Iowa, but a change in that plan has made this the first meet of the outdoor season in which the whole team will be together competing in one place.

At the meet Wisconsin will be competing against Iowa and No. 10 Minnesota.

“It’ll give us a chance to see where we are against some other Big Ten competitors,” head coach Jim Stintzi said.

The Badgers are coming off good performances the past two meets at Marquette and the Drake Relays and hope to continue and improve upon that trend as they get one step closer to the end of the season.

Stintzi also said some of the athletes will be competing in events other than the ones they would normally, and others are aiming to qualify for the NCAA Regional Championships.

One of those athletes competing outside of her normal event is senior Nicole Slaby, who will be running the 800-meter race. Slaby, who is from Cudahy, Wis., normally runs the 400 meters.

“I want to get a good time that will seed me high in [the Big Ten Championships],” Slaby said. “Putting myself in a place to compete.”

This will be Slaby’s last outdoor season at Wisconsin, but she will be competing in indoor next spring before she graduates.

Slaby also said having the whole team together at the same meet is going to be exciting.

“When we’re all separate, you don’t really know what’s going on except for what you read or what you’re told by coaches,” she said. “Because track is such a different sport than team sports.”

Stintzi also emphasized the overall importance of this meet as a stepping stone toward the Big Ten Championships.

“The way track works is that it’s really back loaded, so the Big Ten Championships are just a one day-event. If you do well there, you’re Big Ten champs, and if you don’t, you aren’t, and then regionals and nationals,” Stintzi explained. “So every meet up to that point is preparation in a sense.”

He said the team hoped to improve upon a fourth-place finish at the Big Ten Indoor Championships and that at this point the team just needs to keep everybody healthy and continue to make progress.