SEASON RECAP: Lack of Numbers Hurts Squad

While the Harvard track and field team had anything but a spectacular season record, there’s a story that the numbers don’t tell. The Crimson men lost all three of the team scoring meets and twice finished third of three against Ivy competition. The women fared slightly better, winning one of the three scored meets but also falling to third place in its two three-team Ivy meets.

Numbers on the roster, and not performance, were responsible for the team’s struggles.

“I feel like individually, we’ve become a lot better than any other team,” senior Samyr Laine said. “There’s a reason for our kind of lackluster team performance—we don’t have the numbers of other teams.”

Sophomore Lindsey Scherf opened the Crimson season by obliterating the Harvard record for the 5,000-meter run that had remained untouched for 22 years. Her performance marked the first of seven records to be broken by the team in the 2005-06 season and was the crowning point of the women’s dominance of Boston College; the Crimson took ten of the meet’s 15 events.

Harvard again had impressive individual finishes at its annual Harvard Invitational. The Crimson men won two events and took five of the top seven slots in the 5,000, while the women claimed four top spots on the day.

The most notable improvement was Harvard’s performance at the Ivy League Indoor Heptagonal Championship.

The Crimson men were seventh overall after the two-day contest. Laine, the men’s top scorer, led the Crimson to two of the top four spots in the long jump with a 7.18-meter second-place effort. Laine also earned second in the triple jump, ending his two-year reign in the event.

The women pulled into an impressive No. 4 at the competition’s end. Scherf, not surprisingly, took the 5,000, while senior Mary Sedakowski book-ended her four-year track career with first-place wins in the 60-meter hurdles, earning the fifth Crimson title in the last eight years and helping the team to a fourth-place finish.

“Overall, we scored a lot more points at the Heps championship this year compared to last year,” senior Laura Maludzinski said. “Even though our place on the scoreboard was not quite what we would have liked, I think that we performed very well as a team.”

­—Staff writer Courtney M. Petrouski can be reached at petrousk@fas.harvard.edu.