Track Struggles at Heptagonals

Although they were the hometown favorites, the Harvard track and field teams could not measure up to Ivy competition in the Heptagonals this weekend.

While the meet was held at Gordon Track and Field center, both the venue and races were controlled mostly by out-of-towners as the large teams from Cornell, Dartmouth, and Penn made a lot of noise on and off the track.

“Cornell, Brown and Dartmouth were very vocal and supportive...of their respective high jumpers competing,” senior Tekky Andrew-Jaja wrote in an e-mail. “Their numbers served to make Harvard look grossly underrepresented at home.”

Harvard’s men ended up in seventh place with 30 points when all was said and done yesterday. Last year, the men finished with 45 points, in fifth ahead of Yale and Dartmouth. The women could not do any better—finishing in eighth—although they improved on last indoor season’s nine points by putting up 24 this weekend. The only individual winner on the weekend was junior Samyr Laine in the triple jump.

Cornell won both sides of the championship this year, garnering 147 points on the men’s side and 154 in women’s competition.

Cornell—as well as some other Ivy running powerhouses—brought hundreds of athletes who filled Gordon with competing screams and cheers. On the flip side, while Harvard had a sizeable audience out to root it on in its home track, the Crimson did not even enter competitors in some events due to its lack of numbers.

“Most importantly I view Heptagonals as a success because everyone on our team went out there and gave it their all for the team,” freshman Lindsey Scherf said.

“I definitely felt the crowd behind me as I jumped so my jumps were as much powered by the friends and family members I had cheering for me as my legs,” Laine said. “The atmosphere was just as loud and exciting as I expected and it was much appreciated.”

MEN

The lone Heptagonals champion came for the Crimson late yesterday afternoon, as the meet was just about to finish.

In the triple jump—one of the last competitions of the day—Laine successfully defended his Ivy title from last year. His jump of 15.82 meters bested his performance last year by 0.3 meters, and nearly broke the meet record of 15.90 set by Tuan Weh of Penn in 2000.

“I don’t know how much respect the team gets from a few scattered winners but I definitely feel as if it’s great for the morale of the team,” Laine said. “It gives the team people to rally behind and I guess in a way keeps the weekend from being entirely horrible.”

Senior Travis Hughes also managed to score points in the event by recording a jump of 14.91 meters—good enough to score in fifth place.

In the high jump, junior Clifford Emmanuel took an impressive fourth by clearing 2.09 meters. He has recently returned from a semester in China to join the Crimson.

Harvard’s only sprinter to make it to the finals of any race under 1,000 meters was freshman Jonathan Wofsy. Against some of the best competition Indoor Ivy Heptagonals has had in years, Wofsy managed fifth place with a time of 1:04.92. His time was just 0.7 seconds out of third and two seconds behind the winner, Richard Stewart of Princeton.

Perhaps the Harvard men’s best chance to win a running event came in the 1,000-meter race, for which senior Alasdair McLean-Foreman had the second-fastest qualifying time in Saturday’s semifinal heats.

Yesterday, however, McLean-Foreman was not able to match that time—nor his Indoor Heptagonals’ winning time of 2:25.94 from last year—and finished in fifth place at 2:28.69.

In the throwing events, sophomore James Ayers scored Harvard’s first point of the competition by notching sixth with a throw of 15.90 meters.

The Crimson produced more points than its competitors in the shot put, as co-captain Kristoffer Hinson took home eight points in second and sophomore Christopher Ware took home one in third by tossing the shot put 16.49 and 16.02 meters, respectively. For Hinson, the mark was almost 0.75 meters better than the mark he registered last year.

Unfortunately, the team could not improve as a whole as much as some individuals like Hinson, Ware, and Laine did, and finished with 15 fewer points than last season.

“Our finish as a team was certainly disappointing, especially since I don’t think anybody on the team trains for merely second place—let alone second-to-last place,” Laine said. “However, our finish can be partly accredited to the fact that we’re just working with such small numbers and, compared to teams like Princeton and Cornell, we can’t amass the points that they can. Aside from that, we can only go back to the drawing board and prepare for the coming season.”

WOMEN

Without a doubt, the Harvard woman who had the best meet was Scherf—with her 5,000-meter, 3,000-meter double that earned Harvard a large chunk of its points.

“Going into Heptagonals this weekends my plan was to run every race with 100-percent effort and the results would take care of themselves,” Scherf said.

On Saturday, Scherf ran 16:23.63 in the 5,000-meter race, good enough for second place overall, and the third-best time in Indoor Heptagonals history. A day later, she followed up that record-setting performance by finishing the 3,000-meter in 9:26.32—good enough for third. Scherf actually led the race on yesterday until the 10th lap, when she was finally passed by Caroline Bierbaum of Columbia—who had beaten her a day earlier in the 5,000-meter run. Lindsay Donaldson of Yale ended up winning yesterday, posting a time of 9:16.97.

“It was so motivational to race here at Harvard in front of a home crowd,” Scherf said. “When my teammates would cheer for me during my race it definitely provided me with an extra boost.”

For the meet, junior Laura Maludzinski was the only other runner to score more than two points and finish in the top three in any event. She came up big for the Crimson by taking third in the mile run. Her time of 4:52 was less than half a second behind race-winner Sarah Coseo of Cornell.

In the field events, Sotonye Imadojemu took fifth place in the triple jump with a mark of 11.46 meters.

Senior Eleanor Thompson registered a sixth-place finish in the 60-meter high hurdles by reaching the line in 8.96 seconds. Similarly, junior Stevie De Groff also grabbed one point for the Harvard by finishing in sixth in the 60-meter dash. She completed the sprint in 7.85 to earn the point.

—Staff writer Gabriel M. Velez can be reached at gmvelez@fas.harvard.edu.