While many of Tufts' teams returned early from winter recess to compete, the men's track and field team took its time. When they finally returned to campus, the Jumbos emerged victorious with a win at the Tufts Invitational I, which they hosted at the Gantcher Center last Saturday. With 239 points, Tufts paced a field of eight teams and was 80 points better than second'minus;place UMass Lowell.
The Jumbos clinched many victories in the meet, securing several New England qualifiers with many personal best marks for the athletes.
'It's an early season meet 'hellip;. but we had really good performances across the board,' senior quad'minus;captain Billy Hale said. 'The fact that all the events are clicking while [it's still] early on in the season is showing, and it's exciting to see how we're going to perform in the championship meets just based on the overall strong performances from every event group.'
Hale and fellow senior quad'minus;captain Jared Engelking both won their events with personal'minus;best marks just short of the national provisional qualifiers. To take their respective events, Engelking ran a time of 7.79 seconds in the 55'minus;meter hurdles and Hale posted a 4:18.97 mark in the 1'minus;mile run.
The Jumbos also won the 600'minus;meter run when senior Scott Brinkman finished in 1:24.56, winning by just over a half'minus;second. Classmate Jason Hanrahan also took home a victory, finishing the 1000'minus;meter run in a time of 2:33.36, placing first by over a second.
Other Tufts victories included senior Isaiah Paramore in the high jump at a height of 1.91 meters and junior Sam Read, who cleared a height of 4.34 meters in the pole vault.
Sophomore Scott McArthur took the 5000'minus;meter run in 15:29.68 and was closely followed by junior teammate Chris Brunnquell, who rang in at 15:31.18. Both times were personal bests.
Accompanying Hale in the mile were four other Jumbos finishing in the top six, all of whom posted times under 4:30. Senior Matt Tirrell took second in the race in 4:24.39.
'[It] says a lot about the depth of our distance squad,' Hale said. 'We had a lot of guys that came up from the mile and guys that came down for the mile and guys whose event is the mile. There were a lot of strong performances by both the veteran runners and by the new runners. It demonstrates that we have a lot of depth in the middle distance and distance events.
'We had a really great week of practice leading up to Tufts I,' he continued. 'We were having some really hard workouts, and that really showed that people put in some time over the month that we had off, and as a captain, that is exactly what you want to see... It's easy to take off a little time over the winter holidays, but people showed some serious discipline, and that is really going to pay off in the later season meets.'
The Jumbos next hit the track Saturday at the Wheaton Invitational before splitting up the squad the following weekend at Boston University's Terrier Classic and the Bowdoin Invitational.
