Women’s track finishes sixth in NYS Championship meet
The women’s track team put together a solid performance at last weekend’s New York State Collegiate Track Conference Championships, finishing sixth out of 14 teams, posting 58 total points. “Overall we performed really well,” Head Coach Barbara Hartwig said. “Everyone had very high but realistic goals going in, and for the most part I think we accomplished what we set out to do.”Hartwig added, “By and large it was the best team performance we had all year.”The first event of the day that the women would score points in was the 800-meter dash. Junior Katie O’Brien ran 2:17.02 to provisionally qualify for NCAA Championships, finishing second in the event by a margin of just two hundredths of a second. After missing eighth place by just one hundredth of a second in the 1,000-meter run, senior Elizabeth Canfield ran 4:49.76 in the 1,500-meter run to finish third overall.The women were finally on the positive side of a close call in the 4 x 200-meter relay. The team of freshman Whitney Silkworth, junior Anna Barbi, senior Michelle Gabriele and O’Brien ran 1:51.29 to finish fourth, defeating the SUNY Fredonia team by just two hundredths of a second. The same group also ran the 4 x 400-meter relay, finishing second. In the 4 x 800-meter relay, sophomore Kate Pohlman, senior Katrina Nowak, junior Elizabeth Boerman and Canfield combined to run 10:12.33, finishing in eighth place. Senior Erika Wasserstein, Gabriele, O’Brien and Canfield teamed up in the distance medley, running a time of 12:30.36 to finish fourth overall. “We had huge breakthroughs in both the 4 x 200 and the distance medley,” Hartwig said. “People responded really well, took this very seriously and competed very intensely.” Freshman Melinda Huang posted a mark of 1.57 meters in the high jump, placing her fourth. With a mark of 1.52 meters in the event, Barbi tied for seventh. In the shot put, junior Grace Kraay was fifth, marking 11.66 meters. After finishing ninth in the shot put, sophomore Cynthia Gurecki had a very solid performance in the weight throw, as she marked 13.75 meters to place third, capping a strong weekend for the women.”People were working very hard for every point and everything they got,” Hartwig said. “We really rallied around each other, which is the mark of a good team. If we continue to work this hard, we can’t help but get better.”The next step for the women is to move on to conference championships, where more athletes will attempt to perform well enough to reach the NCAA Championships.Swidler can be reached at dswidler@campustimes.org.
Men’s track and ?eld places 5th out of 14 teams at NYS Championship event
The men’s track and field team entered the New York State Collegiate Track Conference Championships as one of six teams with a chance to win if all of the cards fell into place. Unfortunately for the team, things didn’t go exactly as planned and they had to settle for a fifth-place finish. “We competed well and there was a number of really great things that happened, but there were some circumstances that cost us some points that I think we should have had,” Head Coach John Izzo said. “There were a lot of near-misses.”The first event of the day that the men scored in was the 200-meter dash. With a time of 23.06 seconds, graduate student Brian Strandberg placed sixth, just three hundredths of a second behind the fifth place finisher. In the same event, sophomore Matt Tierney ran 24.29 seconds to finish eighth. Tierney had a better outcome in the 400-meter dash, in which he finished in third place with a time of 50.05 seconds. Finishing behind him, in fourth place, was senior Greg Dusek, who ran 50.77 seconds. The 500-meter dash was the highest point-earning event of the day for the men. Strandberg followed his sixth place finish in the 200 to win the 500, completing the event in 66.34 seconds, more than a full second ahead of his closest competitor, setting a new school record along the way. Freshman Jacob Pylman ran 68.24 seconds to finish in fifth place, beating out a St. Lawrence runner by one hundredth of a second. Junior Mike Hakiel was seventh with a time of 68.45, contributing two more points for the men. Senior Jacob Budny ran 69.10 seconds, finishing in ninth place, just six hundredths of a second behind the eighth-place finisher from Hamilton College.In the 800-meter run, sophomore Chris Clark finished in third-place with a time of 1:54.87. The men were struck with another ninth-place finish in the 1,000-meter run, when junior Matt Rodems ran 2:36.88, narrowly missing the top eight. Freshman Andrew Whitbeck finished among a slew of Geneseo runners in the 3,000-meter run, as he completed the event in 8:49.90 to finish fifth.One of the team’s strong points all season has been its relays. That trend continued in the 4 x 200-meter relay, with the team of Strandberg, Dusek, sophomore Kirk Bristol and Budny finishing in second-place with a time of 1:31.82. Dusek, Strandberg and Budny then teamed up with Clark in the 4 x 400-meter relay to finish second once again, this time posting a time of 3:23.98. In the 4 x 800 meter relay, sophomore Chris Nolan, Rodems, freshman Ben Snyder and Pylman ran 8:05.42, finishing in seventh place. Rodems, Hakiel, senior Alex Voetsch Nolan completed the distance medley in 10:31.95, finishing third overall. In the high jump, Budny marked 1.80 meters to finish in a three-way tie for eighth place. Budny and fellow senior Adam Smith both posted solid performances in the pole vault, but both fell just short of the scoring standard, as they finished tenth and ninth respectively with marks of 3.95 and 4.10 meters. The outcome was similar for Budny in the shot put, which he also finished in ninth place. The difference this time, however, was that the seventh and eighth place finishers were teammates senior Zach Opsitnick and sophomore Andrew Lange, who marked 13.73 meters and 13.62 meters respectively. Senior Andrew Wunder once again had a solid performance in the shot put, marking 14.52 meters to finish fourth. However, Wunder’s best mark of the day came in the weight throw, in which he marked 16.65 meters to finish in second-place and provisionally qualify for NCAA Championships.This weekend the 14 men who qualified for ECAC Championships will head to Bowdoin, Maine. Izzo proclaimed that in Maine, “we are going to try to run people to qualify for Nationals. We have the ability to do that. Now we’ve just gotta go out and do the best we can.”
