W. Track wins Heps

Coach Costanza, who thought the Quakers would finish 7th, could not have been more wrong When Penn women's track coach Betty Costanza told her team the night before the Heptagonal Championships, "Anything can happen out there this weekend," she had no idea the Quakers would turn in a first-place victory. Later that evening, after Costanza's pep talk, the team gathered in junior co-captain Kelley King's room. The team set their goals for Heps, the championship meet among Ivy League schools and Navy. While Costanza had told the team to expect no better than a seventh-place finish in the nine-team field, the players apparently were not listening. According to Costanza, the top two places would be well out of reach, with Princeton and Dartmouth near-locks to finish 1-2. But the Quakers had other thoughts. They thought they could contend for first place despite the absence of junior Michele Belsley, the team's top middle-distance runner, and Daria Smith, Penn's top hurdler. And the Quakers proved their coach wrong, winning the meet with a total score of 102, 10 points ahead of the Big Green. Brown finished third with 88 points, Cornell ended up fourth with 76 and the Tigers finished a surprising fourth with 71.5 points. Harvard (38), Yale (16), Navy (10.5) and Columbia (2) rounded out the standings. Eight years after Penn's last Heps victory, Costanza had plenty of reasons to be pessimistic the night before Heps. For starters, the toughest meet of the year was about to begin and Costanza was minus two of her top athletes. In recent weeks, sophomore hurdlers Dawn McGee and junior runner Chrisann Sevoian had been sidelined with injuries and sophomore Nuru Hunter sat out due to academic reasons. And Costanza was sending an inexperienced, mostly freshman squad to Heps with a few scattered sophomores and juniors, and a lone senior. As it turned out, Costanza's fears and suspicions were completely off the mark. The freshmen didn't struggle at all. In fact, the rookies scored 52 points as a class, picking up much of the slack from their injured teammates. "Our freshman class came through for us like no other freshman class I have ever heard of," junior co-captain Angie Jimenez said. Every freshman that travelled to Hanover, N.H., played an instrumental role in Penn's first-place victory. Following in the footsteps of Jimenez's first-place finish in the pentathlon, Quakers freshman Julia Denisenko broke the 3,000-point barrier to take fourth place. With Smith cheering from the sidelines, sophomore Dawn McGee had a personal best time of 8.17 seconds in the 55-meter hurdle dash, finishing second. "I felt a lot better than I have in past weeks," McGee said. "The adrenaline and intensity of the meet helped me too. On both days I just had great races." Hunter also took fourth in the 55 hurdles with the comeback performance of the season. Despite only competing in one other meet this season, Hunter went up to Dartmouth determined to achieve a qualifying time for the Eastern championships this weekend. "I knew I wanted to qualify for Easterns, but I was kind of worried because I had not competed in a long time," Hunter said. "I was really shooting for third, but I am still happy with my time because I didn't think I was going to go down that far." Other than the 55 hurdles, there was only one other open event that Penn scored points in -- the 200-meter dash. King broke her one-week-old personal best by running the 200 meters in 25.6 seconds, taking fourth place. But it was in the field events that Penn scored its biggest blows. It certainly was no surprise when Quakers freshman Luana Botelho shot putted her way to third place with a distance of 41 feet, 8 inches. Penn junior Erin Soley finally beat her nemesis from Cornell -- Chris Kervaski -- with a throw of 48 feet, 10 inches in taking second place. "Heading into Heps, I was expecting a lot," Soley said. "Before my event, I warmed a lot earlier than I had been. Basically I wanted to have fun with it and enjoy myself. Going into finals, I told [assistant coach Tony Tenisci] that if I had one good throw I would totally psyche her out." As Soley and Botelho were racking up points on one side of the field, freshmen Lisa El and Kim Mason were scoring points in the triple and long jumps on the other side. Entering Heps, neither El nor Mason, who was named to the all-Ivy team, were top seeds. In both the triple and long jumps, El had personal bests. Her triple jump landed her into first place as she broke the 38-foot barrier for the first time this season with a jump of 38 feet, 9.5 inches. The long jump saw Kim Mason soar to first with a jump of 18 feet, 2 inches. But Mason was not satisfied with her leap. "It was not a great day for me," Mason said. "I didn't reach my goal of 18-10, which would have qualified me for ECACs." Penn ended the meet with a bang, taking second place in the 4x800 meter relay and finishing fourth in the 4x400 relay. No one, including the coaches, expected the 4x800 relay to score points after Belsley went out with mononucleosis. In fact, Costanza nearly pulled her team from the race. But after pleading with their head coach, the relay team entered the race and stunned everyone with the second-place finish. "The reason we won was team unity," King said. "The spirit and energy during the meet was insane. Everyone wanted to win, and we knew how talented we were. The team rose to the occasion." As the Quakers boarded their bus back to West Philly, they had proven their coach half right. No, they didn't finish in seventh place. But like Costanza said, anything can happen at Heps.