Harriers Finish Fourth in Meet

It was not a good weekend for the Harvard Indoor Track and Field team.

Hampered by numerous injuries, the team finished a lowly fourth at the 1992 Greater Boston Championships, held this weekend at the Boston University Armory.

The Crimson men finished with a score of 94, far behind Northeastern's top score of 191.

The women finished with a more respectable 112.5 points to Boston College's high score of 142.

Due to the sheer size of the meet, the results were not tabulated until yesterday.

The other teams competing were Tufts, MIT (men only), Bentley and Brandeis.

This was a very disappointing result for the Crimson. Both the men and the women defeated BC in December, while the women beat Northeastern earlier this year.

But last weekend, both the men and the women finished out of the money.

"We really did not mount a sufficient attack for first place," said Head Coach Frank Haggerty. "We had lots of key injuries, especially among the men. We lost a lot of middle distance runners for the men and middle distances are key for indoor track."

"We didn't go in as a full team," agreed Co-Captain John Oakes, who is himself out with an injury. "We might have had a shot at winning if we had played our injured runners, but we decided to rest them this time."

There were, however, a few bright spots for the Crimson. Tanya Weidinger and women's Co-Captain Rita Raju both set school records in the 500 meter dash and the triple jump, respectively.

On the men's side, shot putter Nick Sweeney returned from Olympic training in Ireland to capture his event easily.

Looking ahead to the rest of the season, Haggerty is worried about his team's general condition. Because of new NCAA legislation, the squads were forced to stop practice a week before Christmas, and practices were again put on hold during exam period.

"We need to regain momentum, since we kept having to stop and start up again," Haggerty said. "People try to hurry up and get back to where they were when we stopped practicing and we get lots of injuries.

"Even when we do get back a lot of our injuries, the kids will still have missed a lot of training," Haggerty continued. "But it's good that we got a meet under our belt. Most teams have been competing through January, but this was our first meet since the 10th of last month.

The Crimson has no such layoff before its next competition, which is Saturday's Princeton-Yale-Harvard triple meet, to be held at Harvard.

"Princeton is always solid across the board," said Haggerty, "but Yale is not as strong as they have been in the past. In a dual meet, we would do pretty well against. Yale, but Princeton will take away a lot of points. The women at least should give Princeton a run."

The team seems to be more concerned, however, with "getting itself into some semblance of shape", as Haggerty put it, than going all out for the win this weekend.

Oakes also stressed the importance of healthy runners.

"In the past, we made the mistake of taking each meet superseriously, and that hurt us in the Heps [the Ivy League Championships]," Oakes said. "This year, we are concentrating on getting our runners healthy for the end of the season."