If the outputs of this year's sophomores are any indication, Penn track is going to be in excellent shape two years from now.
The Penn men and women saw strong individual performances from second-year runners go to waste this weekend, finishing third and sixth respectively in the Heptagonal Championships at Dartmouth's Leverone Fieldhouse in Hanover, N.H.
For the second consecutive year, Cornell won both the men's and women's meets.
For the men, Courtney Jaworski won Athlete of the Meet for the second consecutive year. Jaworski set an Indoor Heps meet record in the mile with a time of 4:04.34 and placed second in the 800-meters with 1:53.42.
Yet men's coach Charlie Powell was equally enthusiastic about the rest of his young team's performance in the heptathlon.
Sophomores Kyle Calvo (5,397 points) and Mike Hall (5,352) placed 1-2 in the event, outscoring their closest competitor, Princeton's Will Byrd, by over 300 points. Calvo set a new school record in the event, while Hall's score makes him an NCAA provisional qualifier.
Calvo also won the long jump, making him the only male athlete to win two individual events at the meet.
"They were really kicking it," Powell said of the two young stars. "We are going to be very, very good for a long time."
Ultimately, however, the team failed to match second-place finishers Princeton and Cornell.
Powell cited injuries as one reason the team fell short of its hopes of winning the Heps, but refused to use them as an excuse.
"Every team has [its] ups and downs," he explained.
On the women's side, sophomore Jess Carlin won the 400m in a time of 55.66, while classmate Brittany Middlebrooks finished a respectable eighth in the 60m with a time of 7.87.
Senior Charity Payne finished fourth in the shotput with a 13.75m throw. Junior Shani Boston came close to winning the pentathlon, amassing 3695 points to 3890 for Cornell's Jamie Grubel.
Still, the team's sixth place finish did not meet expectations -- or, for that matter, last year's fifth-place mark.
"We had some really good performances," women's coach Gwen Harris said. "[But] we thought we would do a lot better than we did."
The Cornell women flattened their competition, tallying 142 points and defeating second-place Yale by a comfortable 57-point margin.
