One week after winning its first home meet of the year, the men's indoor track team continued its strong season at the BU Terrier Invitational on Saturday. The meet, which included no field athletes, is one of the toughest on the Jumbos' schedule, and so the team took along only a limited squad.
"The competition there is national caliber, and so it's a privilege to compete," sophomore Andrew Longley said. "We only take a select few people who have done well in the year already. This meet was basically to see where we're at and get some really good times on a very nice track with hard competition."
The highlight of the meet was its first event: the distance medley relay. Running on Friday, the foursome of freshman Greg Pallotta and sophomores Longley, Billy Hale and Jesse Faller finished fourth in the event. Each runner set a personal record in his respective leg of the race. The group finished in a time of 10:06.50 overall, well within the 10:10.00 cutoff to provisionally qualify for the NCAA Div. III Championships.
"What we did this week was put our best possible relay together," Longley said. "The best thing that happened was that all of us had PRs in the relay, and we made the national provisional list, which was the goal."
"It was the first time I've ever run at BU," Faller said. "I was pretty excited to run there because they have a fast track, and we only send a few athletes to compete there. I was especially excited to run the [distance medley relay] with a really fast team, and I knew we'd get a good qualifying time. I was happy we pulled through and did that on Friday night."
The DMR highlight aside, the team had its share of additional fair performances. Sophomores Trevor Donadt and Ikenna Acholonu finished eighth and ninth, respectively, in the preliminaries for the 55-meter hurdles. In the finals, Acholonu finished fifth with Donadt ninth.
In the 200-meter dash, Longley finished 23rd with a time of 22.63, just 0.02 seconds off from the Tufts indoor record, set by Greg Hutton (A '93) in 1993.
"I did pretty well, but I think I can do even better," Longley said. "It was frustrating coming close to a school record. I think I can run much faster than that record, and to be that close was a little disappointing."
The team competed in several other events, but for the most part had trouble with the increased level of competition.
"There were definitely some tough races there, especially because of the competitiveness of the meet," Faller added. "Some of the [distance] guys had tough races because of boxing in and stuff related to that. We're learning more and more as we go. [Sophomore Nick Welch and senior Chris Kantos] ran very respectable times in the 5k, and overall we did very well."
The Jumbos now move on to the Bowdoin Invitational next week, where they can expect to face easier competition in other NESCAC schools. The Invitational carries the same goal as all meets at this point in the season: to qualify and prepare for championship events.
"Basically, we just want to qualify and practice and see where our competition is at," Longley said. "We could try to win every meet, but it would tire everyone out and might cost us in the meets that actually matter, like the New England Championships. Bowdoin next week is another meet to try to get everyone qualified in as many races as possible and to get experience."
