Sports
Track teams take six events at home invite
By Sterling Xie ’16
January 28, 2016
The Hamilton College track teams have largely experienced modest team success so far. In two scored events, the men have finished ninth and third at the SUNY Brockport Invitational and Middlebury Winter Classic, respectively, while the women have finished eighth and fourth at those same events. However, in their first home meet of the season at the Hamilton Invitational, both squads saw numerous individual winners break through, paving the way for the second half of the season, as well as the NYSCTC and ECAC Division III championships.
No team scores were kept at the meet, which was held on Jan. 23. How ever, the men captured six individual events, while the women had four. For the former squad, Eli Saucier ’18 headlined the Continentals’ day, winning the 200-meter dash with a time of 22.55 seconds and the 400 in 50.42 seconds. Hamilton took first and second in two other races—Andrew Mandelbaum ’16 and Grant Whitney ’17 in the 800-meter race, and Jack Pierce ’17 and David Freeman ’16 in the lengthy 3,000-meter race. Dylan Berardelli ’16 (15.22 meters in the 35-pound weight throw) and Leonard Kilekwang ’16 (12.45 meters in the triple jump) rounded out the list of winners for the squad.
Veteran Nate Somes ’16 believes the team is still shaking off some early-season rust, but that the experienced core should eventually bear better results. “It’s still very early in the season so a lot of this point of the season is about getting into the track and field mindset and coming together as a team,” he says. “We’re an older team so we have a lot of leadership to go around but we’ve also had a lot of new talent join recently. A lot of people have shown that they have the potential to make a big impact later in the season. I think overall this is one of the deepest teams we’ve had since I’ve been here.”
Like the men, the women saw a sophomore stand out at the meet. Emily Hull ’18 set a personal best with a 13.22-meter throw in the 20-pound weight throw event. Fellow underclassmen Hannah Jerome ’18 and Mary Lundin ’19 won the 1,000-meter race and 800-meter race, respectively, while Sara Lewis ’16 cleared 2.90 meters to claim the pole vault event. The 1,000-meter race and high jump were the team’s standout events, with the Continentals claiming three top-five finishes in both instances.
Abby Homer ’16 was one of those top-five finishers, claiming third in the high jump. Homer pointed out the team’s formidable group of sophomores as a reason for optimism, pinpointing Jerome, Hull and Mattie Seamans ’18 on the women’s side and Saucier and Henry Whipple ’18 for the men. “Track & Field is interesting since we’re basically in season all of second semester,” explains Homer. “That means that even though indoor track is technically a winter sport, the full team doesn’t come back and start practicing together until the very beginning of the spring semester (a.k.a., a couple weeks ago). Just through practices, though, you can really see peoples’ hard pre-season work paying off—people are already running faster, throwing farther, and jumping higher!”
Hamilton will not have any more meets for the indoor portion of the track season, and in truth, this is simply the build-up to a more expansive slate of competitions in the spring. Both teams have meets over the next four weekends, starting with this week at Brockport, N.Y. in the SUNY Brockport Golden Eagle Invitational, before the aforementioned NYSCTC and ECAC championships serve as the capstone for the winter campaign. The Colgate Class of ’32 Invitational in Hamilton, N.Y. serves as the closest thing the teams will experience to a home match in the winter, with trips to Utica College sandwiched between that meet. Given the success of the cross country team in the fall and the depth on both rosters, it seems fair to expect stronger team results as the Continentals move deeper into track season.