The men's track and field team kicked off its season with the Snowflake Classic, hosted by the Jumbos at the Dussault Track this Saturday. Tufts won its first full-squad meet of the season, but the performance of the weekend came the night before at the Sam Howell Invitational hosted by Princeton University.
Sophomores Matt Rand and Tyler Andrews, as well as graduate student Nick Welch (LA '10), traveled to the invite with hopes of excelling in the 10,000-meter run, and the team did just that.
Rand's time of 30:59.86 qualified him provisionally for nationals, well under the 31:13 mark. The personal record (PR) for Rand puts him in sixth on Tufts' all-time list for the event.
"I was really happy with it," Rand said. "I knew the field would be really competitive, and I'd have 20 guys to pull me along. I wanted to go out between 15:30 and 15:40 [for the first 5K], and that's what I did — 15:33. Then the second 5K is just everything you have every lap, and I latched onto a group of six or seven guys and let them carry me through the second half of the race."
According to Rand, his time will likely not travel to nationals, since in this competitive year he will need a time of around 30:30 to qualify. When the sophomore competes in the event later in the season, he hopes to drop his time closer to the automatic qualifier of 30:10.
"The next few weeks, our workouts will be at a quicker pace, so that my body will get used to get to it and then running a drawn out 10K won't feel as hard, and hopefully I can take off anywhere from 15 to 20 seconds," Rand said. "It will be difficult, but it is certainly possible."
In his first ever 10K, Welch added a strong performance, finishing in 31:41.00. Andrews was just behind with a PR of 31:46.13.
"They were both really happy with their races," Rand said. "30:41 is great for Nick's first ever 10K. He ran a nice, evenly split race, and Tyler did the same. That was a huge, almost 40-second PR for Tyler, and they both got [Eastern College Athletic Conference] qualifiers."
The next day, the rest of the Tufts squad suited up, looking to fend off the wind and give some strong performances of its own to start the season. The Jumbos combined to get 167 points to finish first, well ahead of second-place Springfield's 145 points.
Individually, Tufts claimed three first-place finishes. Senior co-captain Sam Read took first in the pole vault, clearing a height of 13-11 1/4.
"It was definitely not where I want to be overall, but it was still a decent starting point, considering weather and the time of the season," said Read, who switched to a longer pole during the indoor season. "It's still a work in progress, but hopefully that will come together as outdoor finishes up."
Another victory came from junior Alex Orchowski in the high jump. Orchowski, who joined track for the outdoor season and averaged 7.4 rebounds a game for the men's basketball team in the winter, cleared a height of 6-1 1/4.
"Yesterday was Alex Orchowski's first meet ever and really it was only his second time ever high jumping, and he won the meet and went 6-1, which is really impressive," Read said.
Freshman Ben Wallis added a first-place finish in his first collegiate 3,000-meter steeplechase. Wallis' time of 10.01.76 was over 21 seconds ahead of the runner-up.
Additionally, sophomore Gbola Ajayi earned two second-place finishes. His long jump of 21-9 1/2 — an outdoor PR — and triple jump of 43-10 were good enough for runner-up in both events.
Freshman Graham Beutler added another second-place finish in the 400-meter, finishing in 50.91 seconds, just off his PR of 50.70 in the event last weekend. Freshman Brian McLaughlin also earned second place in the 1,500-meter run with a time of 4:03.04. Tufts had three top-five finishers in the event.
Freshman Atticus Swett was the highest finisher among the Tufts throwers this weekend, taking third in the javelin throw with a distance of 162-6. Adding a third of his own was classmate Kevin Norman in the 400-meter hurdles, with a time of 1:01.74.
The team is optimistic about the starting point at which this weekend leaves them.
"It's early in the season, so the weather's never great and people are still getting back into training, but the team that we have this year is definitely built more for outdoor than indoor. We had a decent team indoor, but I think we can do a lot more outdoors," Read said. "This team doesn't have the studs that last year's team did, but we've got a lot more depth, so we're hoping that will pay off for us outdoors."
Next weekend, the Jumbos head to UMass-Lowell for the George Davis Invitational looking to build off of this weekend's performances.
"We're really just trying to get up to peak performances as quick as possible because there's only three more weeks between now and NESCACs," Read said. "With such a short season before NESCACs, it's definitely important to get people to qualify in what they need to qualify in."
