Laine, Adjah Register Strong Showings For Track and Field

The Harvard track and field team didn’t rack up many points over three days of competition, but its low score failed to represent the impressive individual performances in the IC4A and ECAC championships at Princeton.

The Crimson only sent six team members to the event, but those who competed did well, with several earning spots at the NCAA regional competition which will be held at Manhattan College’s Randall’s Island Facility on May 27. The competitions were among the last for the team’s seniors and they wanted to make the most of them.

Harvard was not looking to win the competition—with so few team members participating it would have been very difficult to do so—but it did want to put last weekend’s disappointing performance at the Heptagonal Championships at Columbia behind it and look toward the future.

“We’re not estatic about the results,” junior Lawrence Adjah said, “but we’re looking to make progress.”

Harvard’s sole championship at the event came in the triple jump, an event in which three Crimson jumpers met the regional qualifying mark. Junior Samyr Laine won the event with a 15.89-meter leap. In third place was Adjah with a 15.49-meter jump, slightly better than his performance last weekend at Heps. Senior Travis Hughes sealed the repeat of last week’s one-three-six finishes with a 15.11-meter jump, qualifying for the NCAA regional competition by three-hundredths of a meter.

Hughes also had an outstanding performance in the men’s long jump, placing 12th with a 6.95-meter jump. His 7.39-meter performance last weekend qualified him for regionals.

In the shot put competition, senior Kristoffer Hinson threw a 16.78-meter shot, 0.38 meters better than last week and far enough to push him past the 16.61-meter regional qualifying mark.

Senior Lindsey Yourman surprised everyone, including herself, when she came in eighth place in the 5,000-meter run with a personal best time of 16:57.06. Seeded last in a field of about 40 competitors, the last thing she expected to do was score a point for her team. She was only five seconds short of qualifying for regionals.

“We were all excited to race and to give it our all,” Yourman said. “Especially since I’m a senior, I was happy to finish with a personal improvement.”

Senior Eleanor Thompson finished 14th in the 100-meter hurdles with a time of 14.72. She missed the regional qualifying time by less than a second.

Freshman Lindsey Scherf, the bright spot of last weekend’s performance at the Heps, did not compete this weekend because she was resting up for NCAA regional competition, where she will compete in the 5,000-meter event. Last weekend, she set the American junior record in the 10,000-meter event when she finished with a time of 32:51.20. Had she competed in the event this past weekend and finished with that same time, she would have come in first place by over a minute and a half.

For now the team is working to “perform well and move on,” Adjah said. “We’re going to work hard at regionals to make sure we make it to Sacramento,” where the NCAA championships will be held.

—Staff writer Elyse N. Hanson can be reached at ehanson@fas.harvard.edu.