The Penn men's track and field team dominated many events at this weekend's Heptagonal Championships, pushing the Quakers to a second-place finish.
On the track, Grafton Ifill took both the 100- and 200-meter dashes, while Courtney Jaworski won the 800-meter race and David Whitehurst won the 110-meter hurdles.
In the field, Kyle Calvo won the long jump, and Neal Wojdowski took the pole vault.
On the women's side, Shaunee Morgan set a new Penn record in the 200m dash, but the team still dropped to fifth place at the championships.
Building off of a fifth-place finish at the 2005 Penn Relays against a field that included some of the fastest collegiate runners in the country, Ifill easily won both the sprints at Heps. He was the first Penn runner in more than a decade to win both the 100m and 200m dashes. Ifill ran the 100m in 10.40 seconds -- the fourth fastest time in Heps history. His mark of 20.90 seconds in the 200m qualified him for NCAA Regionals -- and was the best time in 18 years at Heps and the fastest in history by a Penn runner.
Accordingly, Ifill was named the Male Athlete of the Meet.
"Once the warm weather starts coming, he's going to run real fast. He's a fantastic athlete," men's track coach Charlie Powell said. "Eddie James, the guy who held [the 200m] record, is one of the best we've ever had. He was a couple-time all-American, so [Ifill] is in good company."
Iffil beat out James' record by just a hundredth of a second.
Jaworski put up another strong performance for Penn in the 800m, although winning this race didn't require him to run any record times. Jaworski won with ease in a time of 1:49.75, crossing the line two and a half seconds ahead of his nearest competition. The victory earned much respect from his coach.
"That couldn't have been a more convincing win," Powell said. "When was the last time someone won an 800-meter race by two and a half seconds? It's been a long time. Not even Sam [Burley, a former Penn 800m runner] could do that. It was one of the most dominating performances I've seen in a long time."
Whitehurst, a freshman hurdler and basketball point guard, is finally getting into the swing of things. He won the 110m hurdles with a solid time of 14.27 seconds. Whitehurst beat Dartmouth's Mustafa Abdur-Rahim, who he lost to by a hundredth of a second a month ago at Franklin Field.
In that race, Whitehurst's time was 14.54, so he has clearly begun to shake off the rust left after concentrating on basketball for six months.
"He's starting to get going," Powell said. "We knew it would take him a while, running hurdles is not just like running straight."
Calvo, a freshman, won the long jump with a leap of 7.53 meters and is proving to be a premier young talent. Wojdowski has won numerous events in his senior year, as he again won the pole vault for Penn with a jump clearing five meters.
For the men and the women, the Heps are essentially the Ivy League championships. The men won six of 21 events for 96 points, as they placed in a tie for second with Dartmouth, 40 points behind Cornell and one ahead of Princeton.
Penn won six events, but simply did not have the depth to contend with Cornell. The Quakers believed they had a chance to win, but knew that Cornell was the favorite. In the end, they finished too low in too many events to seriously contend for the team championship.
After a solid performance at the Penn Relays, the women's team took just a fifth place finish this weekend. The Quakers came close but fell just short in several events, finishing second or third seven times but never gaining the full 10 points of a first-place mark. Like in the men's competition, Cornell ran away with the victory.
The most notable performance came from Morgan, a freshman sprinter. Morgan's 200m time of 24.14 seconds was the best ever by a Penn runner, but she was edged by Yale's Joslyn Woodard by less than a tenth of a second.
