This season has proved to be a trying one for members of the Yale men’s and women’s track and field teams, which have battled illness and injury throughout the year.
The teams’ struggles were on display at this weekend’s Ivy League Championships at the Gordon Indoor Track at Harvard. The women’s team scored 19 points to finish in seventh, just above last-place Brown, which tallied 14.5 points. The men’s team limped to a last place finish, amassing only 15.5 points. Cornell captured the men’s crown, scoring 157 points over the course of Saturday and Sunday, while Harvard took the women’s title on its own track with a score of 117.
“I think we were hoping we would do a little better. If it was a perfectly ideal day, where everyone performed at their very best, we could have scored a few more points,” Allison Rue ’13 said. “Still, I was pleased that we at least moved out of last place; we’ve been stuck there for a while, so we’re moving in the right direction.”
Although the women’s team was unable to muster any top-three finishes, the team placed fourth in four different events. In the shot put, Karleh Wilson ’16 threw 13.80m to secure a fourth-place finish. The 4×440-yard relay team, composed of Rue, Kelsey Lin ’14, Shannon McDonnell ’16 and Emily Cable ’15, finished in 3:51.99, nearly 8 seconds behind the winning Cornell squad. McDonnell also took fourth place in the 800m, running 2:15.64 to finish just under two and a half seconds behind first place.
Finally, Amanda Snajder ’15 took fourth in the pentathlon with an overall score of 3658. While that mark scored only four points for the Elis on that day, Snajder set a new school record in the event.
“I’d say that breaking the record proved to be a byproduct of me having a tremendous amount of fun competing in each of those events,” Snajder said. “I really had just wanted to represent my team and contribute to our overall score — the record was the bonus that came from doing exactly that.”
On the men’s side of the competition, the Bulldogs also struggled to put points on the board. Despite the disheartening day for the team overall, several performers provided bright spots for the squad. James Shirvell ’14 ran 2:26.90 en route to a third-place finish in the 1000m, less than a second and a half off of first place. The team recorded fifth-place finishes in both the 440-yard relay and the distance medley relay.
Perhaps the most exciting event of the weekend for the Elis was the men’s pole vault, in which they amassed five and a half total points behind the efforts of Brendan Sullivan ’16 and Paul Chandler ’14. Sullivan recorded a vault of 4.70m, good for fourth place, and Chandler tied for fifth place with a vault of 4.60m.
The men’s and women’s track and field teams will continue their seasons next weekend at the IC4A championships at Boston University.