Pagliasotti named All-American

For an NCAA track and field athlete, nothing could have been finer than to have been in Carolina last week.

More precisely, collegiate track and field's best of the best gathered in Durham, N.C., for four days last week to compete in the NCAA Championships on the campus of Duke University.

The Penn men's track and field team lays claim to three of those elite competitors. Seniors Sean MacMillan and Matt Pagliasotti and freshman Sam Burley all competed in the championships.

"It's a completely different level of track and field," Penn Head Coach Charlie Powell said of the tough competition his Quakers faced. "This is an Olympic year, so the competition is especially fierce. Some of us did well, and some did not so well."

Pagliasotti did well. Although he finished out of the scoring in the hammer throw -- a toss of 199' 7" earned him 13th overall -- his sixth place finish among U.S. throwers means he was named an All-American.

"He moved up [from his previous rank], and that was something he really wanted to do," Powell said. "He came in and realized, 'I can finish ahead of these guys' and he did."

Pagliasotti -- an architecture major -- also won Penn's Class of '15 Scholar-Athlete Award, given each year to the school's best all-around student-athlete.

While Pagliasotti ended his Penn career with a bang, Burley finished his freshman campaign with a strong 800-meter race that turned more than a few heads.

"[Burley]'s quite the talk of the town, so to speak," Powell said. "Everybody was like, 'Holy cow, he's only a freshman?'"

Burley ran 1:42.29, just six-hundredths of a second short of his personal record.

Powell was proud of Burley's poise in his first championship, and in an Olympic year, no less.

"He finished right at what he came in at, 13th overall, which is kind of funny," Powell said. "For a freshman, that's pretty phenomenal."

MacMillan's race was less than phenomenal. Although he's had an immensely successful senior campaign, MacMillan couldn't get on track in Durham, and came in behind every other finisher in the steeplechase.

"Sean went in with some major expectations," Powell said. "He tried to control the race. He went in with a game plan and [the race] just buried him. Sometimes you can react and salvage something decent, but he wasn't able to."

MacMillan normally likes to go all out the entire 3,000 meters of the race and not save any energy. In this race, it backfired on him.

"His normal tactic is to go bang away at it, run the whole thing hard," Powell said. "About halfway through [the race], he realized that it wasn't going his way, and he didn't know what to do."

Although MacMillan's finish at NCAAs was nothing to write home about, his season isn't over.

MacMillan qualified for the Olympic trials at the Penn Relays earlier this year, so MacMillan can use his disappointing finish to correct his mistakes by mid-July.

"It could turn out to be a blessing," Powell said.

But can't last-place finish be detrimental to a runner's confidence?

"It'll hut his confidence somewhat," Powell said. "But it'll steel his resolve not to go out and run someone else's race, too. It will make him realize that you have to go out there and do what's good for you."

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