The Harvard men’s and women’s track teams open their seasons tomorrow afternoon with dual meets against Boston College at the Gordon Track and Tennis Center. The two teams—each of which has a bona fide NCAA individual title contender on its roster—will look at tomorrow’s meet as the first step towards beating out the seven other Ivy schools and Navy at the Indoor Heptagonal Championships on Feb. 23-24 at Cornell.
The men’s team, captained by John Cinelli and Kobie Fuller, enters the season as close to full potential in terms of health and participation as it has been in recent years. With the addition of junior Chris Lambert—one of the United Kingdom’s top sprinters—to its team, as well as the usual influx of freshman, the team will look to improve on its 2001 Heps fourth-place finish, which would have been a second-place finish had it not been for a questionable disqualification.
The women’s team, led by co-captains Carrie McGraw and Nicky Grant, will try to stay at the top of a league which has lost an unprecedented level of talent to graduation. While Harvard may have graduated the league’s two greatest athletes—sprinter and hurdler Brenda Taylor ’01 and high jumper Dora Gyorffy ’01—the team still returns strong league title contenders in the throws and jumps and expects considerable improvement in the distances and some freshman reinforcement in the sprints.
Harvard Men
Harvard Coach Frank Haggerty ’68 expects that title-winning talent will be there for the men’s team, but more work must be done if the Crimson is to contend with perennial Ivy powers Penn and Princeton for the Heptagonal title.
“Across the board in all events we’ve got some good top-line strength,” Haggerty said. “What the coaches and competitors have to work on is to ensure that we have some depth.”
The addition of Lambert provides an immediate boost to the team’s indoor 60-meter sprinting core, which typically has been made up of carry overs from the football team, led by junior Sean Meeker. Lambert stands to be not just the best sprinter at Harvard, but one of the best college sprinters in the world.
He proved that this summer when he earned a bronze in the 100 for the United Kingdom at the World University Games in Beijing. His 10.24-second run that earned him fourth at British Nationals last year was nearly a full half-second faster than the winning time at Heps last season.
“Barring the unforeseen, nobody is going to come close to him,” Haggerty said.
Lambert had not run collegiately for his first two years at Harvard due to disagreements over training regiments, but he will be making his Harvard debut in the near future.
Another British native, sophomore Alasdair McLean-Foreman—actually a club teammate of Lambert’s—is the Crimson’s other top title contender. As a freshman, he won the indoor title in the 800. Haggerty plans to move him up to the mile this year, and expectations are that he can run near the four-minute mark.
Coming off of the strongest cross-country season in recent years—in which the team placed fourth at NCAA regionals despite a disappointing fifth place at Heps—optimism is high among the distance runners. Cross-country captain John Friedman, who placed fifth in the 5000 at Heps last year, will contend in that event again this year, as will junior Nathan Shank-Boright, who took fifth at cross-country Heptagonals last month. Haggerty also expects that junior Matthew Seidel, who placed eighth at cross-country Heps, will surprise people in the 3000. Junior John Traugott will contend for the title in the 1000 to follow up a second-place finish in the event last year. Cinelli should also be making a comeback this year following up an illness-plagued junior campaign.
Haggerty believes that a resurgence in the talent in the middle-distances should allow him to keep from having to move back his distance runners. Fuller, who placed third in the 400 at Heps his junior season leads the pack, while seniors Osahon Omoregie and Nnamdi Okike, both of whom placed at Heps as sophomores and then took last year off, will now be back in contention.
Senior Shawn Parker—a third place-finisher at Heps in the 60-meter hurdles—is among the favorites this year, and junior Niall Murphy, once he recovers from football season, is also more than capable of scoring points.
Senior Eric LaHaie, another football carryover, and an incoming freshman, should contend in the pentathlon.
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