Men's Track Places Third at Indoor Heps

Behind a plethora of strong individual and team efforts, the Columbia men’s track and field team took home an impressive third-place finish at this year’s Ivy League Indoor Heptagonal Championships.

The Lions finished the meet with 82 points—the highest men’s finish in school history—behind overall winner Cornell and second-place Princeton, who finished with 176.5 and 121.5 points, respectively. The women’s team, meanwhile, tied with Dartmouth for with a total of 41 points despite several impressive individual finishes.

The story of the day was Cornell, which successfully defended its 2008 title on the men’s side while ousting the defending champion Tigers on the women’s side. The combined Big Red victory was the first sweep of Indoor Heptagonals since the 2007 season, when Cornell last accomplished the feat. No team besides Princeton or Cornell has won either a men’s or women’s title at Heptagonals since the Brown women’s team took home a championship in 2001.

For Columbia, the odds for an upset were long, but both teams captured a number of individual titles over the two-day competition. The men’s 4x800-meter relay team of Christopher Hays, Mike Mark, Jeff Moriarty, and Kyle Merber easily replicated the Light Blue’s victory at the New Balance Collegiate Invitational to win the title, finishing in 7:35.96 and outpacing Yale’s second-place squad by five seconds.

In the sprints, Stefan Vutescu won the 60-meter dash with a time of 6.90 seconds, easily beating Brown’s Marc Howland for first, while back in the distance events, Moriarty picked up the title for the 1,000-meter run. Both runners easily qualified for next weekend’s ECAC/IC4A Indoor Championships in their respective events. In the 800-meter run, Mark, Matt Stewart, Dylaan Isaacson, and Mike Weisbuch finished second, third, fourth, and sixth respectively, adding 19 points to the Lions’ total. Bobby Hartnett’s third-place finish and Jeff Randall’s fourth-place finish in the 3,000-meter run supplied Columbia with another 10 points in the competition.

Megan Lessard won the only title on the women’s side, concluding her final Heptagonals with a time of 4:46.60 and a first-place finish in the mile. Sharay Hale fell short of her past record of 54.66 seconds in the 400-meter dash and was outpaced by Brown’s Nicole Burns, who took home the title in 54.88 seconds, approximately three-tenths of a second ahead of Hale. Following the men’s outstanding relay efforts, the women’s 4x400-meter relay squad of Marissa Smith, Laura Vogel, Kyra Caldwell, and Hale finished the relay in 3:48.87, two seconds behind Cornell’s victorious team.

In the triple jump, senior Elisse Douglass managed an impressive jump of 12.13 meters, qualifying her for the ECAC/IC4A championships while capturing a second-place finish and eight additional points for the Light Blue.

Cornell’s Jeomi Maduka was the star on the women’s side, taking home four titles and breaking two meet records in the 60-meter dash and the triple jump. For her efforts, the Big Red senior was named Most Outstanding Performer of the meet. For the men, that honor was split between a pair of Tigers, as pole vaulter David Slovenski and heptathlete Duane Hynes received the award.

Although the indoor team season is over, Columbia’s qualifying team members will continue to race, heading to Boston next weekend for the ECAC/IC4A Indoor Championships.