Despite finishing sixth overall, the Dartmouth women's track and field team turned in some impressive performances at the 2010 Outdoor Ivy League Heptagonal Championships. Priscilla Trojano '12 took first in the heptathlon, finishing 166 points ahead of Harvard University's second-place finisher Nicole Silva.
With 38 points as a team, the Big Green was relatively far behind Cornell University, which took first with 146.5 points.
"I think, especially for the women's side, we had a lot of great results, and a lot of people scored both on the track and in the field events," captain Natalie Stoll '10 said. "We finished sixth, which is not too bad, and we were pretty excited about that, and we were overall definitely happy with how we did."
Trojano, who was named first team All-Ivy on Monday, wasted little time getting the Big Green on the board, finishing the first day's multi-events with 2,864 points.
Of the multi-events, Trojano won the 100-meter hurdles with the only finish below 15 seconds, at 14.92, and the 800-meter run, clocking 2:21.43.
It was not Trojano's first brush with victory, as she won the pentathlon at Indoor Heptagonals earlier this year.
With a top score of 4,454 points, Trojano entered this year's Outdoor Heptagonal Championships having accumulated the highest score of all her competitors in the Ivy League.
Multiple Dartmouth athletes qualified for the Sunday finals of their events.
Amy Schuman '12 secured a bid to the final in the 1,500-meter run with a sixth-place finish. She improved in the final, taking fifth.
Stoll captured fourth place in the 400-meter dash in the qualifiers and claimed fifth in the final, while Christina Supino '12 garnered fifth in the 800-meter run on the first day and fourth in the final.
"I was mainly focused on the 400, and I just really wanted to make the finals," Stoll said. "I was very excited, and I had a [personal record], which surprised me actually."
Also earning a spot in a final round was Alexandra Tanner '11, who placed third in the preliminary round of the 400-meter hurdles.
With a time of 1:01.37, Tanner was on her way to defending her title in the event she secured a first place finish in last year's Heptagonal Championships at the University of Pennsylvania.
Tanner did not manage a repeat of last year's feat, however, but did secure a fourth place finish.
Stoll said that this weekend's results did not deliver any surprises.
"We were really happy because sometimes we feel ready to compete, and we have a lot of promising marks before the championships, but it doesn't end up working out for us [at Heps]," she said. "It was exciting because we scored on at least four track events, and there were no major surprises we did what we were hoping to do."
Princeton University, which led after Saturday with 41.5 points, had secured the Indoor Heptagonal Championships earlier this year, clinched 125 points at the outdoor Championships, while Columbia University followed in second with 110 points.
The Big Green came up short in the winter indoor Heptagonal Championships, tying with Yale University for seventh.
Dartmouth women's track and field has yet to win Indoor Heps in its 28-year history.
The Big Green's best indoor finish came in 1996, when it hosted the event. Dartmouth placed second with 92 points 20 points behind first-place Penn.
Meanwhile, the team has seen greater success outdoors, where it claimed first place in the event in 1977 the team's only Outdoor Heptagonal Championship win to date.
Dartmouth has also notched multiple second-place finishes, its most recent coming in 2000, when it was bested by Brown University.
While some individuals are gearing up for further championships like the IC4A and the ECAC next weekend at Princeton, the team's season has come to an end.
Looking back on the year, Stoll said that she was happy with the overall results.
"It went really well," she said. "I feel like we're moving up against the other Ivies. Compared to last year, I think we did really well as a team this year."
