While both the Penn men and women’s track and field teams finished in the lower half of the standings at the 2010 Heptagonal Indoor Championships, each coach had opposite reactions to the results.
The men finished seventh out of eight teams with 33 points, while the women placed sixth with 48 points.
But while men’s head coach Charlie Powell left disappointed, women’s head coach Gwen Harris was extremely pleased with her team’s result.
On the men’s side, Powell noted that his team’s subpar score could have been the result of mitigating factors.
“We have a couple of guys who are sick and nursing injuries,” he said. “And with the weather this past month it was kind of tough for us to get ready.”
Junior James Foreman posted the Quakers’ only points Saturday, with his third-place finish in the pole vault. Originally tied for third, Foreman won a tie-breaker for the spot by having fewer misses than competitor Eric DePalo, a Yale senior.
Penn senior Jeremy Sinclair and freshman Tim Carey both qualified for the 60-meter hurdles finals on the first day of competition, but it was the freshman who ultimately captured the title the next day.
Carey was the only event winner for the Quakers on the weekend.
Powell hopes this meet will push his team to train harder for the outdoor season.
“I think they realize they need to step it up one small notch,” Powell said. “We aren’t too far off, we just need to change one or two things."
Meanwhile, on the women’s side Harris applauded the performance of her young team, which is comprised of many freshmen and sophomores.
“We did what I thought we could do,” Harris said. “They are still learning.”
Freshman Leslie Kovach and seniors Yelizaveta Lozovatskaya and Kathryn Gevitz were the only Quakers to score Saturday.
Kovach finished fifth in the 5,000 meters, setting a new personal record with her time of 16:54.32. The Irwin, Pa., native missed the NCAA provisional qualifying time by only five seconds.
In the pole vault, Lozovatskaya finished third. Reaching a height of 3.70 meters, her performance made her Penn’s all-time second-best pole vaulter.
Gevitz rounded out the day with a fifth-place finish in the long jump. She went on to capture the Heptagonal title in the triple jump Sunday.
Based on this weekend’s performances, Harris is looking forward to the outdoor season.
“We had five kids in the 60 that were under 8 seconds. That’s tremendous,” she said. “It puts us in a place that hopefully we will do a tremendous job outdoors. It gets the team confident to go outdoors.”
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