If you can jump five-and-a-half feet, you can play basketball without worrying about being stuffed. You can look over crowds at parades and reach the top shelf at grocery stores.

But it you're Erin Sugrue, five-and-a-half feet is simply too short.

Sugrue is one of those people who exudes an aura of great athletic ability. When you watch her, you can tell she won't be second-best.

The Harvard women's track and field captain has dominated the indoor track season like few have done before her.

Sugrue is coming off perhaps her finest meet, the Greater Boston Indoor Track and Field Championships, in which she won the high jump, the triple jump and the 60-yd. hurdles. She also set new Harvard and meet records for the pentathlon with a whopping 3428 points.

Sugrue's record-setting performance in the five-event contest in even more remarkable because she hadn't competed in a pentathlon since she was a senior in high school.

"The coaches have always been toying with the idea and I've always resisted, especially now with my [high] jumping going so well. It's really not good that I do so many other events. I came down [last] Tuesday and they said, 'could you come over here, we'd like to talk to you about the pentathlon,"' Sugrue said.

Despite breaking a meet record set by B.C. pentathlete Susan Goode in 1984, the multi-talented Sugrue modestly added, "It's the kind of event where if you do one or two things well and the rest fairly well, you'll win."

Sugrue has done much more than one or two things well.

She presently holds, in addition to the pentathlon mark, Harvard records in the triple and high jump. She set a new triple jump record of 38-ft., 1/2-in. against Northeastern on January 10, which she broke six days later against B.C. and B.U. with a jump of 38-ft., 5-in.

It is the high jump record, however, of which she is most proud.

Sugrue broke the record, originally held by Jackie Grim at 5-ft., 6-in., in December of 1985, in her first indoor season.

She's been setting a new record every couple of months ever since. Finally, last December 7, she became the first Harvard woman to clear six feet.

"That [record] will stay a lot longer than the triple jump. Six feet is a barrier line. There are a lot of women who can do 5-ft., 8-in., but six feet is a barrier that not many people will get to," Sugrue says.

Sugrue has always been able to clear a lot of barriers. At Westwood High School, the Massachusetts native was an All-Star forward under current Harvard basketball Coach Kathy Delaney Smith and ran spring track.