“Our finish as a team was certainly disappointing, especially since I don’t think anybody on the team trains for merely second place—let alone second-to-last place,” Laine said.
“Our finish can be partly accredited to the fact that we’re just working with such small numbers and, compared to teams like Princeton and Cornell, we can’t amass the points that they can,” Laine added.
As the outdoor season began, Harvard traveled south to compete in the Bayou Classic in early April. That meet was followed up with impressive showings at the Brown Invitational.
The field team—and especially senior Travis Hughes, who won the long jump with a leap of 6.76—carried the men to a third-place finish.
The women finished a bit further back in fifth, on the strength of another impressive performance by its freshman contingent. Kalu swept the 50-meter and 200-meter dash again to pace a small Crimson squad, earning her place among the best freshmen sprinters Harvard has ever had.
Despite the strong showing in Providence, the Crimson’s focus was on the big meets they would face in the coming weeks.
“We have a really big race against Yale and [the Brown Invitational] was really more of a sharpening meet before Yale—where we really hope to have our best performances,” junior Lindsay Crouse said.
Neither team could carry its momentum into the key dual meet against Yale, as the men fell by a score of 101-61 and the women 99-64. Senior Reed Bienvenu paced the men with his win in the 5,000-meter run—Harvard’s only victory on the track—while senior Eleanor Thompson did the work for the women by winning the 100-meter high hurdles.
At the outdoor Heptagonal Championships, the Crimson could not muster enough to dig itself out of the bottom rung of the Ivy League, as both teams finished eighth in the final conference meet of the year.
In only her first year, Scherf had the most impressive performance on the team, placing second in both the 5,000- and 10,000-meter runs to take All-Ivy honors.
Laine extended his Harvard career by earning a berth to the NCAAs with his winning leap of 16.03.
Hughes was the Crimson’s next-best finisher with a third-place finish in the long jump.
“I view Heptagonals as a success because everyone on our team went out there and gave it their all for the team,” Scherf said.
Scherf still has three more outdoor Heptagonals in which she will race for Harvard, and with other young talent, the Crimson will look to continue to inch up in the standings next year.
—Staff writer Gabriel M. Velez can be reached gmvelez@fas.harvard.edu.