M. Track not excited by IC4As finish

Despite logging its highest overall finish at the Eastern indoor championship IC4A meet since 1980 and seeing a long-standing school record in a major event fall, the Penn men's track and field team was not completely satisfied as it made the long trip back from Harvard Sunday night. "Overall, I'd say we did decently," Quakers assistant coach Nathan Taylor said. "We performed much better than we had [at the indoor IC4As] in the last 10 years, but not everybody did the best they could have done." Penn finished 14th overall and second among Ivy League teams with 19 points. Ancient Eight rival Princeton finished fourth overall with a score of 42. Georgetown won the competition by a wide margin with a final tally of 87.5 points. Points are calculated based on order of finish in individual events. Teams get 10 points for a first-place finish, eight for second, six for third and one less for each finish below that. Penn also finished second to Princeton a week earlier at the indoor Heptagonal Championships -- the Ivy League's championship meet -- at Dartmouth. That meet was more satisfying, as several of the teams top athletes had their best performances of the season. Only less-than-stellar performances by the middle-distance runners kept the Quakers from winning the competition. This weekend was a different story for Penn. Although he only finished eighth in the 800-meter race, junior Neil Riordan was the Quakers' star at the IC4As. Riordan ran a time of one minute, 51.90 seconds in the final heat Sunday, breaking the Penn indoor record of 1:52.00, which was set by Julio Piazza in 1972. "The race went out really fast," Riordan said. "I was in the back, chasing the pack. I ran fast because the other guys were all going so fast. I was pulled along." Junior sprinter Greg Davis was the only other Quaker to place in the top eight in an individual event. Davis's time of 6.43 seconds was good enough for fourth in the 55-meter dash, Penn's highest finish of the weekend. He had won the event in 6.45 seconds at Heps. The Quakers' mile-relay squad finished fifth, with a time of 3:17.58. This came despite the absence of the team's anchor runner, Chris Harper, who was sidelined with a strained hamstring. Senior Clive Brown moved to the anchor leg from his usual second leg, and junior middle-distance runner Jim Primerano stepped into the lineup in Brown's place. As expected, the triple jump was Penn's strongest field event, although sophomore Dave Davenport, who had been Penn's strongest performer in the event all year, failed to place. Freshmen Stanley Anderson and Dan Nord finished sixth and seventh in the event, respectively. One of the pleasant surprises of the weekend for Penn was the performance of junior shot putter Chris Osentowski. He finished sixth in the shot put with a toss of 52 feet, eight inches. "Chris has been learning a new technique in the shot, and he had been slumping since the second meet of the season," Taylor said. "He was in a high pressure situation [this weekend] with a technique he hadn't gotten used to, but he performed well." Riordan thinks the Quakers would have finished higher if it hadn't been for injuries and the mental strain arising from consecutive championship meets. "Most other leagues had the week off," he said. "It's hard to get psyched up for big events two weeks in a row."