The women’s track and field team successfully wrapped up its indoor season in two postseason meets and has already started its outdoor campaign, in which the athletes hope to improve on their disappointing fifth-place finish at the Indoor Heptagonals.
Joslyn Woodard ’06, who hit the NCAA provisional standard in the long jump at Heps, was invited to participate in the NCAA championship, held Mar 12-14 in Fayetteville, Ark.
Woodard placed 14th with a jump of 5.88 meters. Hyleas Fountain, a University of Georgia senior, won the event with a mark of 6.58 meters.
A week earlier, Woodard and a small group of Bulldogs competed at the ECAC Championship in Boston. Despite entering only three events, the Elis placed 15th out of 45 teams.
Pole vaulter Molly Lederman ’06 was the top finisher for the Bulldogs. Lederman cleared a height of 3.85 meters to place second in the event behind Buffalo’s Laura Olson, who cleared a height of 3.95 meters.
In a display of their middle distance strength, the Bulldogs’ 4×800-meter relay team, running without its top 800-meter runner Vanessa Mazandi ’05, qualified for the finals with the fastest time in the preliminaries.
In the final, Vanessa Everding ’05 and Katie Greene ’06 kept the Elis near the front of the pack through the first two legs. Rebecca Dickens ’04 took the lead on the third leg, running a 2:08 split to tie her personal best. Dickens handed off to Julia Emmanuel ’07, who anchored the team to a third place finish.
“Emmanuel usually doesn’t run the 4×800 with us,” Greene said. “She ran a great leg, but some teams had fresh runners in, runners different from the preliminaries, and so [they] had more of a kick at the end.”
The Bulldogs ran a second faster in the final than they did in the preliminaries, finishing in 8:58.56. Georgetown won the event with a time of 8:52.06, and University of Maine took second in 8:57.25.
“At ECAC’s some teams don’t use their fastest people in the preliminary race because they are usually running other races individually, so we knew just because we had the fastest time going into the final we would still have to run faster the next day,” Dickens said.
While some of the Bulldogs were competing in the last meets of the indoor season, the rest of the team was hard at work, preparing for outdoor. The Bulldogs started their outdoor campaign this weekend at the UC-Irvine Collegiate Classic. Katrina Castille ’07 won both the 100-meter dash and the 200-meter dash to lead the Bulldogs to a fourth place finish in the team competition behind Cornell, Air Force and UC-Irvine. Captain Lisa Wygant ’04 won the long jump with a mark of 1.68 meters.
The Bulldogs received second places from four athletes — Cara Kiernan ’07, who ran 4:37.97 in the 1500; Anne Martin ’05, who ran 10:57.43 in the 3000-meter steeplechase; Woodard, who ran 12.14 in the 100; and Lederman, who cleared 3.75 meters in the pole vault.