The track teams continued their postseasons on Feb. 27 and 28, competing in the Open New England Championships. “Opens,” as the meet is nicknamed, takes the top athletes across all NCAA divisions and brings them together to compete at Boston University’s Track and Tennis Center, home of one of the fastest banked 200m indoor tracks in the country. With fleet feet on their minds, the Panthers attacked the meet with vigor.
The meet began the afternoon of Feb. 27 with a selection of women’s events. Alex Morris ’16 set a season best in the 400m dash by running 58.56 seconds as the lone individual competitor for the women Friday afternoon. The distance medley relay team of Summer Spillane ’15, Morris, Paige Fernandez ’17, and Erzsie Nagy ’17 ran 11:48.44 for a third-place finish, but their time was marginally slower than the best Middlebury mark of the year set earlier in the month.
After the conclusion of the women’s events, the men took to the track Friday evening. Kevin Serrao ’18 set a new personal best in the 800m, running 1:54.13 to place 14th and was the top placing true freshman in the meet. Kevin Wood ’15 gathered All-New England honors in the 5000m run, finishing 25 laps of the track in 14:37.03, an all-time personal best for fifth place.
Like the women, the men also raced a distance medley relay team. Sam Cartwright ’16, Alex Nichols ’17, Luke Carpinello ’16 and Wilder Schaaf ’14.5 teamed up to run 9:57.95 to finish eigth. Their mark currently ranks them 13th in Division-III, a tough place to be in, as the top-12 declared marks qualify for NCAA Championships. In a later heat of the DMR, Amherst College set the all-time Division-III mark by running 9:48.61, breaking their 2011 team’s record of 9:49.11.
The teams returned to the track Saturday morning ready to impress with more fast times. As has been the theme for much of the season, the Middlebury milers again lit up the track. In the women’s race, Nagy, Spillane and Sarah Guth ’15 finished third, fourth and fifth by running 4:56.53, 4:57.11 and 4:57.48, respectively. Alison Maxwell ’15, who ran 4:53.63 the previous week, had an off day but still took ninth place by running 5:06.13. In the men’s mile, Cartwright shook off the previous night’s DMR to run 4:14.36 and Sam Klockenkemper ’17 set a new personal best by running 4:15.56.
In the 3000m run, Adrian Walsh ’16 ran 10:10.69 for 17th place. Walsh’s time was one-hundredth of a second off of tying Maxwell’s school record mark in the event. Brian Rich ’17 set a new personal best by running 8:37.98, also finishing 17th.
The Panthers will get one last chance at qualifying for NCAA Championships this weekend, competing either at the Tufts Final Qualifying Meet on March 6 or the ECAC Championships on March 6 and 7 at the Armory in New York City. The top-15 men and top-17 women in individual events qualify for NCAAs and the top-12 relays for each gender qualify. At the time of publication, the men currently would send Schaaf in the mile (ranked 12th) while the DMR is on the outside looking in at 13th. The women would send Maxwell, Nagy and Spillane in the mile (ranked second, 11th and 14th), Walsh in the 5000m (ranked 13th) and a DMR team (ranked fourth). Some of the milers, though, may opt to run the DMR fresh rather than doubling up events. The last weekend of the season always proves to be crazy with a wide swath of last chance meets contested across the country.
