M. Track ice cold in fourth-place finish

Track teams compete indoors all winter to avoid cold weather in places like Ithaca, N.Y., where the Penn men's track team was this weekend. The indoor environment of Cornell's Barton Hall, however, did not protect the Quakers from the icy reaction of their coach, Charlie Powell, to a subpar fourth-place performance. "[I'm] not at all pleased," Powell said. "We just did not have a good meet at all." Penn finished well behind the host Big Red, as well as Buffalo and St. Joseph's, at the Cornell Six-Way Invitational. The Quakers fared better than only Colgate and Ithaca College. Finishing with a mere 88 points, the Quakers scored less than half the 180.5 points of their victorious Ivy League rivals. Powell was not upset at last week's second-place finish, but was very distressed at the lack of readiness that his team displayed on Saturday. "I think a lot of guys need to work a little harder," Powell said. "Some people went home over break and maybe didn't do the type of work that they needed to do. We'll see if they can put it back together again." Some of Penn's athletes did come back to school all ready to go, and those were the athletes who garnered points for the Quakers. "It's pretty obvious and you don't have to be a genius to figure out the guys who have performed well," Powell said. "Tuan [Wreh] and Brian Abram, and Sam Burley, O'Neil Bryan, Jie Sun. A few guys like that are doing extremely well." Wreh finished fourth in the long jump, while Abram and Burley were tops in the 400- and 500-meter dashes, respectively. Bryan won the 60-meter high hurdles, while Sun finished third and came within a little more than 1/10 of a second of winning the 60-meter dash. "If we had the whole team doing that, we'd be a lot better off," Powell said. "We're a little behind where we should be, and it's time to play catchup." Some events were particularly troublesome for the Quakers. No Penn milers, for instance, earned points in Ithaca. The biggest problem for Penn, however, was in the field events. The Quakers only earned 10 points for their throws and jumps this weekend and did not have a single point-scorer in the triple jump or the high jump. "When you get to a meet, you've got to be mentally and physically prepared," Powell said. "Some people were ready, some were not." Penn was clearly most ready in the hurdles, as Bryan and Jared Shoemaker went one-two to earn 18 of Penn's 88 total points on the day. Another bright spot in an otherwise dark day for Penn was in the meet's longest event, the 5,000 run, as Bryan Kovalsky and Andy Kish finished in third and fourth place, respectively, picking up 10 points for the Red and Blue. "We've got a small contingent that have really done their homework and are performing great," Powell said. "We've just got to get the rest of the group to catch up."

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.