Sports

Garnet men set many PRs

In print | April 17, 2008

The Swarthmore men’s track team traveled to The College of New Jersey to compete at the TCNJ Invite this past Saturday. They enjoyed a marvelous day of sunshine, good competition and a number of season PRs. Dan Hodson ‘09 described the day’s efforts, saying, “It was long and hard, and it kinda hurt … but it was satisfying in the end.”

Four mid-distance men, Connor Darby ‘09, Andrew VanBuren ’10, Dave Riccardi and Alex Breslow ’11, got the day off to a splendid start with a fourth place finish in the 4×1500 meter relay. They impressed spectators with their time of 18:21. All that teammate Chris Mayer-Bacon ’11 had to say about Darby’s leadoff leg was “God damn it Darby! You’re the man!”

This was followed by a blazing Conference qualifying time of 4:08 in the 1500 by Ross Weller ’08, his first of the season.

After Weller brought the heat to the track, three more Swarthmore men kept it sizzling with season PRs in the 800. Dan Kurz ’11 ran a 2:06, followed by Seth Green ’10 running a 2:10 and Alex Breslow with a time of 2:26.

These men were not the only PRs of the day. Tramane Hall ’11 ran a 24.98 in the 200 meter dash to keep the records rolling in. Hall also doubled back to run a 56.6 in the 400 along with a quick 57.3 by Mayer-Bacon.

Hall, who had showed the campus a bit of what he was made of in the Mr. Swarthmore competition the night before, was fairly pleased after the meet, stating, “Being second runner up in Mr. Swarthmore and then setting a PR on the track. Pretty sweet weekend so far.”

Mayer-Bacon continued to improve upon his 400 meter hurdle time, posting a quick 1:02. Jonathan Shoop ’08 ran a beautiful 5k to finish the impressive day of Swat running. Asked about his race, Shoop said, “It was hot … and lonely.” During the excruciating middle laps of his 5k, Shoop had to work by himself for the most part, not quite close enough to the leaders to pull from them, but too far in front of the rest of the pack to get anything from behind.

There were mixed results from the field events. Neel Prakash ‘09 and Tommy Huang ’10 represented the throwers in the shot put, discus and javelin. Prakash expressed his view of the day’s results, saying, “It wasn’t the greatest weekend, but we trained really hard this past week — so you can look forward to a little something special this coming weekend.”

Throws coach Tom Reynolds on the other hand had a thoroughly enjoyable weekend as the meet was held in his hometown of Ewing, New Jersey. In fact, Reynolds may have even had a life-changing experience. In his own words, Reynolds said, “I ran into my ex-girlfriend, we’re getting back together and the future never looked brighter.” To top the day off, his parents even came to show their pride and support Reynolds as he coached his Swarthmore athletes to success.

Speaking of parents, Coach Pete Carroll articulated his happiness with the weekend saying, “It was great having about eight or ten parents at the meet, watching their kids. Some parents came [from] as far as California.” With all of that support, no wonder the track team kept turning out such fine performances. Swat track will be in action again this weekend at the Widener Invite.