Earlier this week, Eastern Kentucky announced that they will be adding Ahmed Jaziri from Tunisia and Nerea Izcue from Spain to their men's and women's rosters, respectively. Each athlete is expected to have one full year of eligibility remaining between indoor track, outdoor track and cross country.
Jaziri joins the Colonels with a handful of impressive personal bests which includes a steeplechase PR of 8:35. He also owns times of 3:43 (1500) and 14:08 (5k). The Tunisia native has experience competing in the Mediterranean Games and has also appeared in multiple national championships.
Jaziri will join an EKU men's cross country squad which showed plenty of promise last fall, but was unable to qualify for the NCAA Championships. The Colonels were led by top scorer Ezekiel Kibichii in 2019 and were without their top 2018 talent James Sugira who hasn't competed since February 2019.
As for Izcue, the Spaniard owns strong personal bests of 16:47 (5k) and 34:42 (10k). She also competed in the Euro U23 10k Championships in 2019. She joins an Eastern Kentucky women's group where she will be the clear top distance talent on the team.