The men’s track team rebounded from a poor performance at the New York State Collegiate Track Conference Championships to finish a strong 22nd out of 64 teams at the East Coast Athletic Conference Championships hosted by Tufts University last weekend.
Facing superior competition the team rose to the occasion, redeeming themselves in the last event of the winter season.
The 4 x 200-meter relay team crossed the finish line in 1 minutes, 33.25 seconds, finishing eighth in the field. The 4 x 800-meter relay team finished in 8:00.13, good enough for fifth overall.
Sophomore Alex Voetsch finished the 1,000-meter race with a time of 2:33.12, placing him in third place.
The top individual performance of the weekend came from sophomore Jacob Badny, who finished second in the pentathlon by a 14 point margin.
Upbeat about the performance of his team, head coach John Izzo said that the results were “much better than last weekend. Even in the stiff competition, they performed close to their peak abilities.”
The women’s team did not disappoint either, finishing 28th out of 65 teams and continuing to build upon the records they set just a week earlier.
The first strong showing of the weekend came from the distance medley relay team of sophomores Mary LeBrun and Erika Wasserstein and juniors Kate Sattelberg and Madeline Worsnopp. They took more than 7 seconds off their time from the previous week, meeting the provisional national qualifying standard.
Although they didn’t finish in the top 10 relay teams, and therefore won’t get the opportunity to compete in Nationals, head coach Barbara Hartwig called it “a wonderful accomplishment for these women. They don’t run this outside, so we’ll look to do better next year.”
The 4 x 200-meter relay team broke its own school record to continue the strong showing. Finishing ninth, the team of juniors Liz Conway and Angela Burgess, senior Sue Mayo and freshman Katie O’Brien beat its previous record of 1:49.65 by posting a time of 1:49.47.
“They had just broken a very old record last week and ran even better Friday,” Hartwig said.
Once again, Conway continued to rewrite the UR record books. In addition to participating on the record setting 4 x 200 meter relay team, she padded her personal stat sheet by finishing the 500-meter dash in 1:20.02, beating her previous record of 1:20.21.
Another solid performance came from freshman Anna Barbi, who ran her best 55-meter hurdle race of the season on her way to placing seventh in the pentathlon.
Pleased with the overall performance of the team, Hartwig said they “more than met the challenge.”
“It was definitely a very happy bus coming home,” Izzo added.
Swidler can be reached at dswidler@campustimes.org.
