"It's no secret that the Heps meet is always the most important weekend of the entire year," women's head coach Sandra Ford-Centonze said. "We start talking about Heps during pre-season training in the summer and September. Once the indoor Heps meet is over we talk about the outdoor meet. Doing well there is without a doubt the crowning glory of any team's season."
Each Ivy League school will send its best 72 runners, jumpers and throwers to Yale. Each team can send up to 36 men and 36 women, and a maximum of five athletes per school can compete in a given event.
There is some dispute as to which team should be considered the favorite at this year's outdoor Heps. Princeton won the women's indoor Heps title in early March, while Cornell has been the Ivy League's powerhouse for the past decade, winning seven of the last eight men's Heps meets.
This year the Dartmouth men finished fourth at indoor Heps, while the women took eighth place. The Big Green has improved substantially this spring, with the addition of some of its strongest athletes from other winter sports. The men's side in particular has benefited from the addition of distance runners Ben True '08 and Glenn Randall '09. True took the Winter term off to prepare for this summer's Olympic trials and Randall, a member of Dartmouth's Nordic ski team, won the NCAA championships in the men's 10-kilometer cross-country skiing event.
One Big Green team to watch at Heps will be the men's distance medley squad. At the Penn Relays on April 26, the group of True, Harry Norton '08, Charlie Stoebe '08 and Mike Carmody '08 missed the school record in the event by .08 seconds.
Two of the more exciting events at the Heps meet will be the men's decathlon and the women's heptathlon. Tyler Koskenoja '07 has perfected his technique in each of the ten events this year and is one of the favorites to win the decathlon at Heps.
In its most recent meet, the Big Green hosted several individual athletes and smaller schools in a tune-up event at the Dartmouth Invitational in Hanover. Dartmouth won 15 of 17 events and had several athletes post their best times of the season.
The Invitational was relatively small this year as a result of its concurrent timing with the Penn Relays, and few schools were willing to send athletes from Philadelphia to Hanover with Heps looming just two weeks away.
Similarly, none of the Ivy schools sent competitors to the annual New England Championships, which began Thursday at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, N.H.
This week, the Big Green has been fine-tuning specific event techniques and tapering down workouts in preparation for the action this weekend.
"The coaches have all been very pleased with the results this season and expect nothing less this weekend," Ford-Centonze said. "I know our athletes will all go out and compete. Everyone is really excited and feeling good."
The Big Green has athletes seeded in the top 10 positions across the board, with several ranked first in the Ivy League in their respective events. Heps seeds are determined by the best time, height, or distance in a regulation meet event during the course of the season. Individuals gain team points at Heps by finishing in the top six spots of an event.
"Anything can happen when you are seeded in the top 10," Ford-Centonze said. "Being 10th doesn't mean that you won't be able to end up in the points. All of our athletes will be running 100 percent because absolutely anything can happen. Even if the race starts out poorly, someone might drop a baton in a relay or commit an infraction and be disqualified. We are out there to give it everything all the time."
Many believe there will be a bull's-eye on Princeton's back after the Tigers sneaked past the competition in March. With a variety of subplots and specific inter-school competition, anything could happen.
"Everyone has been dropping their times and breaking records all season," Ford-Centonze said. "The work has been done. There simply is not a lot more that the coaches can give our athletes to be ready."
Men's events begin on Saturday with the 100-meter dash in the decathlon, while women's action will begin with the javelin throw.