The men's track and field team's roster for the upcoming NCAA National Championships is finally set in stone.
Five Jumbos have been awarded bids to Nationals, to be held Mar. 10 and 11 at St. Olaf College, in Northfield, Minn.: seniors Matt Fortin (mile run) and tri-captain Matt Lacey (5k run), junior Fred Jones (triple and long jumps), and sophomores Jeremy Arak (high jump) and Dan Marcy (triple jump).
The five individual qualifiers are the most in Tufts history; previous teams have sent more competitors in the form of relays, but the five this season is a new program record for individuals.
"All five have shown marked improvement," coach Ethan Barron said. "Div. III track and field continues to grow more competitive year in and year out, and all qualifiers rose to the occasion."
This past weekend, Div. III track and field athletes competed in a series of last chance meets around the country, hoping to improve their positions on the national performance lists. The competition is fierce around the nation; an average of 13 athletes receive Nationals bids per individual event. In relays, 10 teams typically qualify.
Tufts competed in last Friday's Trinity Last Chance Meet, held at Yale University, as well as in the IC4A Championships at Boston University on Saturday, a meet that attracted competitors from top teams in all three divisions.
Tufts aimed to qualify both the Distance Medley Relay (DMR) and the 4x400 meter relay, but both teams failed to achieve a Nationals berth.
"I was very pleased with how the relays ran," Barron said. "We ran as well as we possibly could. A lot of the teams this weekend were on the Iowa State track [at the ISU Qualifier]. It's a very fast track, and we knew some very fast times would be coming out of that meet."
The Jumbos entered only the 4x400 team of freshman Will Forde, sophomore Nate Scott, and seniors Patrick Mahoney and tri-captain Trevor Williams in Saturday's IC4A meet. Tufts was provisionally qualified for Nationals in 20th place going into the competition, a mark achieved on the same track during the Feb. 25 All-New England Championship when substitute member junior Nate Cleveland ran in place of Mahoney.
The banked track at BU lends itself to faster times, and thus all times recorded on it are converted for comparison to other performances. The 4x400 team ran a raw time of 3.18.91 at New Englands, and it hoped that the addition of All-American Mahoney would spark a qualifying mark. However, even on the banked track, the team clocked a slower time (raw time of 3:20.24) than the New England Championship squad.
The 4x400 squad finished its indoor season with a time 1.18 seconds short of Bates, the last team to qualify for Nationals.
At Friday's meet, a Div. III-only competition, Tufts entered the DMR squad as well as individual athletes.
The DMR team of Mahoney, Cleveland, and seniors Kyle Doran and Fortin finished second with a time of 10:06.09, almost six seconds behind the victor Elizabethtown College. The team's raw time, converted to 10:08.39, was 11th place on the national performance list, just one place short of 10th-place Wartburg College and a bid to Nationals.
"Nothing went wrong on Friday," Cleveland said. "Before the race, we'd talked about what each guy needed to run to get there. We thought that if we ran 10:05, 10:06, we would qualify for Nationals. We just didn't anticipate that so many teams from the Midwest would qualify this weekend. I don't think we could have run remarkably faster, [at least] not enough to make a difference."
Last year's DMR squad, which included Mahoney, Fortin, Williams and then-senior Aaron Kaye, finished eighth at Nationals.
No athletes from Tufts achieved a last-minute or unexpected Nationals qualification this weekend, as all Nationals-bound Jumbos had set their marks earlier in the season.
At the Trinity meet, junior Dustin Virgilio finished third in the 400 with a time of 51.66 seconds. It was a strong run for Virgilio but well behind the time of this year's last 400 Nationals qualifier, senior Josh Hauser of Wartburg College (48.95 seconds).
Arak and freshman Ted McMahan both jumped 1.91 meters and finished sixth and seventh, respectively. Arak is among 14 jumpers qualified for next weekend's NCAA Championships, nine of whom are tied at Arak's 2.03 meter mark.
Jones, ranked seventh in the country, is only 0.07 meters short of the 7.24 Nationals automatic qualifying mark. He won the long jump with a leap of 7.17 meters, improving upon his previous qualification mark of 6.99 meters.
Marcy placed third in the triple jump with a 13.98 meter bound. Ranked 11th nationally, Marcy is one of 13 triple jumpers in next weekend's Championship. Jones, who did not compete in the triple jump at Trinity, is qualified in the event with a No. 5 national ranking. He was ranked third before this weekend's last chance meets, but his 14.45 meter mark was surpassed by seniors Karl Zelik (14.48) of Washington Missouri College and Bryson Taylor (14.46) of Greenville College.
Senior tri-captain Jason Galvin ended his season with a pair of fifth-place finishes in the shot-put and the weight throw.
The Jumbos are now focused on preparing the five qualifiers for the upcoming Championships.
"There is both a psychological and physical taper," Barron said. "At this point you've done all the work. It's now a matter of fine-tuning and resting up."
