Central College Junior Will Daniels is once again a national champion, winning in the heptathlon for the second consecutive year at the NCAA Division III Indoor Track and Field Meet on Saturday. He is only the second Central College individual track athlete to ever go back-to-back in winning the country’s top prize, matching Ethan Miller’s decathlon outdoor titles in 2011 and 2012.

Daniels, a native of Geneseo, Illinois, piled up 5,418 points this weekend to secure the top spot, and was just 23 points shy of tying his own Division III all-time record. Cody Faust from the University of Wisconsin-Platteville was a distant second with 5,239 points.

Opening the day with a 60-meter hurdles times of 8.64 seconds, Daniels followed with a pole vault of 13-7.25. He finished off the competition with a time of 2:53.53 in the 1,000-meter run. With Daniels’s 10 team points, Central finished in a tie for 19th in the team standings.

“He went out there and gave it everything he had,” coach Brandon Sturman said. “He did what he had to do and at the end of the day he was the champion. That’s all that matters. He learned a lot about how to manage doing multiple events and we think looking forward we’ll be able to improve on that.’

Central will return for the outdoor track season in three weeks. On Friday, March 29, the Dutch will compete at the Washington University Invitational in St. Louis.