Although they were the hometown favorites, the Harvard track and field teams could not measure up to Ivy competition in the Heptagonals this weekend.

While the meet was held at Gordon Track and Field center, both the venue and races were controlled mostly by out-of-towners as the large teams from Cornell, Dartmouth, and Penn made a lot of noise on and off the track.

“Cornell, Brown and Dartmouth were very vocal and supportive...of their respective high jumpers competing,” senior Tekky Andrew-Jaja wrote in an e-mail. “Their numbers served to make Harvard look grossly underrepresented at home.”

Harvard’s men ended up in seventh place with 30 points when all was said and done yesterday. Last year, the men finished with 45 points, in fifth ahead of Yale and Dartmouth. The women could not do any better—finishing in eighth—although they improved on last indoor season’s nine points by putting up 24 this weekend. The only individual winner on the weekend was junior Samyr Laine in the triple jump.

Cornell won both sides of the championship this year, garnering 147 points on the men’s side and 154 in women’s competition.

Cornell—as well as some other Ivy running powerhouses—brought hundreds of athletes who filled Gordon with competing screams and cheers. On the flip side, while Harvard had a sizeable audience out to root it on in its home track, the Crimson did not even enter competitors in some events due to its lack of numbers.

“Most importantly I view Heptagonals as a success because everyone on our team went out there and gave it their all for the team,” freshman Lindsey Scherf said.

“I definitely felt the crowd behind me as I jumped so my jumps were as much powered by the friends and family members I had cheering for me as my legs,” Laine said. “The atmosphere was just as loud and exciting as I expected and it was much appreciated.”

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The lone Heptagonals champion came for the Crimson late yesterday afternoon, as the meet was just about to finish.

In the triple jump—one of the last competitions of the day—Laine successfully defended his Ivy title from last year. His jump of 15.82 meters bested his performance last year by 0.3 meters, and nearly broke the meet record of 15.90 set by Tuan Weh of Penn in 2000.

“I don’t know how much respect the team gets from a few scattered winners but I definitely feel as if it’s great for the morale of the team,” Laine said. “It gives the team people to rally behind and I guess in a way keeps the weekend from being entirely horrible.”

Senior Travis Hughes also managed to score points in the event by recording a jump of 14.91 meters—good enough to score in fifth place.

In the high jump, junior Clifford Emmanuel took an impressive fourth by clearing 2.09 meters. He has recently returned from a semester in China to join the Crimson.

Harvard’s only sprinter to make it to the finals of any race under 1,000 meters was freshman Jonathan Wofsy. Against some of the best competition Indoor Ivy Heptagonals has had in years, Wofsy managed fifth place with a time of 1:04.92. His time was just 0.7 seconds out of third and two seconds behind the winner, Richard Stewart of Princeton.