For the Penn track teams, last weekend's IC4A/Eastern College Athletic Conference Championships ? held at Princeton ? went off like most of the rest of the season. The Quakers broke records, but did not have a spectacular team result.
Freshman phenom Jesse Carlin continued her outstanding rookie campaign, breaking Jeria Wilds' 15-year-old school record in the 400-meter dash by a quarter of a second with a time of 54.41. The time was good for a second-place finish behind Northeastern's Ahndraea Allen who ran away from the field to win with a time of 52.77. Carlin's time was the fifth fastest in Heptagonal (Ivy League) history, and qualified her for the NCAA Regionals being held Memorial Day weekend at Randall Island, N.Y..
The 4x100m relay team of Carlin, freshman Shaunee Morgan, sophomore Krysta Copeland and senior Izu Emeagwali also broke a Penn record, and actually broke the former Ivy League mark with its time of 46.30. The time was good for sixth place at the meet.
The women's 4x400m and 4x800m teams also won points for the Quakers, finishing third and second overall, respectively.
As a team, the Red and Blue finished tied with Rutgers for fifth place out of 45 schools competing at the meet ? certainly a good result, but not enough to take defeat Heptaganal champion Cornell, who came in second overall behind Pittsburgh. West Virginia and Northeastern also came in ahead of the Quakers at third and fourth, respectively.
As for the other Ivy League schools, Yale finished ninth, Columbia 10th, Princeton 12th, Brown 19th and Harvard tied for 42nd.
On the men's side, at the IC4A championships, senior Neil Wodjowski recorded the best performance for Penn, finishing second in the pole vault to Cornell's Evan Whithall, losing the title on misses at a height of 5.05 meters.
The other top-10 finishes for the Quakers were freshman Kyle Calvo's fourth-place result in the decathalon and fellow freshman Tim Kaijala's ninth-place finish in the 800m run.
The men's team finished in the middle of the pack, coming in at 24th of 48 teams. Men's Heptaganal champion Cornell again finished second overall, this time to Rutgers, with Yale finishing tied for ninth, Princeton 11th, Harvard 12th, Brown tied for 15th and Columbia tying Penn, Massachusetts-Lowell and Northeastern for 24th.
Both the men's and women's teams will take a week off as they prepare for the NCAA East Regional meet beginning May 27th. There, 2004 National Qualifiers Courtney Jaworski and Neal Wojdowski will lead the rest of the Quakers' regional qualifiers in their bids to reach the NCAA Championship meet in Sacramento, Calif.
