Stricker Runs Sixth Fastest Two-Mile; Thinclads Finish Eighth in Title Meet

Harvard sophomore Jenny Stricker Saturday clocked the sixth fastest women's two-mile time ever recorded.

Stricker's 9 43 33 earned her a first-place finish and half of the Harvard women's track team's 20 points at the seventh annual Eastern Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women championship held this weekend at the ITT.

The Crimson's eighth-place showing topped all Ivy schools, including the Princeton squad that edged out Harvard last week in the Heptagonals. Penn State garnered 92 points to successfully defend its title in the 36 team meet.

Stricker said she would prefer not to dwell on her performance explaining that she believes her time should improve. In a really big race there is so much excitement that inspires you to run faster," she said. "If you get a top runner to set the pace and do the work for you then can run even faster.".

Stricker is looking ahead to next week's Nationals in Detroit where she hopes someone like Standard's Party Plummer might give her that extra drive needed for a record breaking run.

Earlier Theresa Moore broke two school records running the 60 yard dash 7 42 seconds and posting a 17-ft 9 12 in long jump. Moore's record-breaking efforts weren't good enough quality her for Saturday's finals.

Aside from Stricker's run the Eastern Championship proved to be an anticlimactic ending to the Harvard season. Only nine members chose to complete although most of the team's 20 athletes had qualified for the meet.

"I felt it was more important for me to do some work on my thesis," noted Captain Karen Gray who qualified in the pentathlon.

"I think we could have done better than we did, but we really didn't emphasize this most in our schedule." Heed Coach Frank Haggerty said. "With so much of the team taking off to catch up on school work, we had our runners double up in events."

Given the Crimson line-up, Assistant Coach Denis Cochran-Fikes said that "there were no real surprises, there were no major losses, and everything was pretty close to what we expected."

Patterson finished seventh in the Pentathalon with 3330 points, 92 shy of her third-place score at last week's Heptagonals. Last year, she scored 3422 points for third place in the Easterns at West Virginia.

"I think we approached the meet too casually, probably because we didn't have to travel. I think we could have done better if we had traveled, we would have taken the meet more seriously and we would have had more incentive to do well. We were too relaxed," she explained.

Kate Wiley crossed the finish line for the two mile in 10 minutes, good enough to break the old school record. Unfortunately for Wiley, Stricker set a new school record just 17 seconds earlier Wiley settled for third place.

Marie Acacia took fourth place in the shot put with a 44-ft., 3 3/4 in hurl, while Grace deFries, clocked at 2:18.3, finished eighth in the half mile.

"I think we approached the meet too casually, probably because we didn't have to travel. I think we could have done better if we had traveled, we would have taken the meet more seriously and we would have had more incentive to do well. We were too relaxed," she explained.

Kate Wiley crossed the finish line for the two mile in 10 minutes, good enough to break the old school record. Unfortunately for Wiley, Stricker set a new school record just 17 seconds earlier Wiley settled for third place.

Marie Acacia took fourth place in the shot put with a 44-ft., 3 3/4 in hurl, while Grace deFries, clocked at 2:18.3, finished eighth in the half mile.