SEASON RECAP: Track and Field

Harvard may have dominated the Ivy League in 14 different sports this year, but when it came to track and field, the rest of the league had the Crimson’s number.

In head-to-head matchups during the indoor and outdoor seasons, the Harvard track and field teams only managed to edge one Ivy opponent—when the Crimson men beat Columbia to finish seventh at the indoor championships.

In the opening meet of the season against Northeastern, the men started off with one of their best performances of the year, defeating the Huskies 75-68.

The final relay of freshmen Haibo Lu and Christopher Green, sophomore Sean Barrett and co-captain Alasdair McLean-Foreman pulled out a 150-meter victory in the final race of the meet to cap the victory.

The women did not fare as well, losing to the crosstown rival 77-50.

In late January, the two teams saw their first Ivy competition of the year when they squared off against Cornell and Brown. Neither Harvard team put up much of a fight, although freshman Chidimma Kalu won the 50-meter and 200-meter dashes to begin an impressive season for the young sprinter.

For the men, seniors Samyr Laine and Kristoffer Hinson also took victories in the triple jump and shot put, respectively.

Just two weeks later, the Crimson faced a similar fate against Yale and Princeton when both teams lost by over 40 points to the Tigers.

The usual suspects—Laine and Hinson—both won again, while seniors Tekky Andrew-Jaja and McLean-Foreman also beat out the Ivy competition.

Andrew-Jaja won the high jump by clearing 2.09 meters, while McLean-Foreman was victorious in the 1,000-meter run, crossing the line in a time of 2:29.25.

Senior Eleanor Thompson won the 50-meter hurdles in 9.03 seconds.

At the end of February, the Heptagonal Championships came to Cambridge as Harvard hosted the league’s final meet of the indoor season.

The home track advantage did not pan out, however, as the Crimson fans were outnumbered and outshouted by their Ivy counterparts. The men finished seventh and the women eighth.

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

Laine leaped 15.82 meters to the triple-jump victory and an All-Ivy nod. Hinson also earned the distinction for his second-place finish in the shot put, while freshman sensation Lindsey Scherf was awarded it for her second-place finish in the 5,000-meter run.

“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.

“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,” Laine added.

As the outdoor season began, Harvard traveled south to compete in the Bayou Classic in early April. That meet was followed up with impressive showings at the Brown Invitational.

The field team—and especially senior Travis Hughes, who won the long jump with a leap of 6.76—carried the men to a third-place finish.

The women finished a bit further back in fifth, on the strength of another impressive performance by its freshman contingent. Kalu swept the 50-meter and 200-meter dash again to pace a small Crimson squad, earning her place among the best freshmen sprinters Harvard has ever had.

Despite the strong showing in Providence, the Crimson’s focus was on the big meets they would face in the coming weeks.

“We have a really big race against Yale and [the Brown Invitational] was really more of a sharpening meet before Yale—where we really hope to have our best performances,” junior Lindsay Crouse said.

Neither team could carry its momentum into the key dual meet against Yale, as the men fell by a score of 101-61 and the women 99-64. Senior Reed Bienvenu paced the men with his win in the 5,000-meter run—Harvard’s only victory on the track—while senior Eleanor Thompson did the work for the women by winning the 100-meter high hurdles.

At the outdoor Heptagonal Championships, the Crimson could not muster enough to dig itself out of the bottom rung of the Ivy League, as both teams finished eighth in the final conference meet of the year.

In only her first year, Scherf had the most impressive performance on the team, placing second in both the 5,000- and 10,000-meter runs to take All-Ivy honors.

Laine extended his Harvard career by earning a berth to the NCAAs with his winning leap of 16.03.

Hughes was the Crimson’s next-best finisher with a third-place finish in the long jump.

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

Scherf still has three more outdoor Heptagonals in which she will race for Harvard, and with other young talent, the Crimson will look to continue to inch up in the standings next year.

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