For the men’s and women’s track team, tomorrow’s home meet against Pennsylvania is a chance to tune up for the Penn Relays next weekend and Heptagonals on the second weekend of May.
However, this is much more than a tune up meet.
For the men’s side, this is a chance to show the rest of the league that the Cornell squad will be a forced to be reckoned with.
“We are going to use this meet to send a message to the rest of the league,” senior tri-captain Pete Ippel said.
Ippel is expecting his unit, the jumpers, to come up with some points against the Quakers.
“We are definitely going to bring a lot of pain to Penn in the jumps,” he said.
He also pointed to the 4×100 squad as another strong group.
“They are finally starting to gel as a team,” Ippel said.
Junior Max King is also coming off a performance in which he provisionally qualified for the NCAA meet in the steeplechase.
On the women’s side, the team is hoping to see what it can do as a unit. It has not raced as a complete squad since before Spring Break, so it does not know exactly what it is capable of doing.
“We really haven’t had a meet that shows our full capabilities,” senior Kim Chatman said.
Chatman expects the team to run away with the middle distance and long distance events. She feels the sprints and the field events should be tightly contested.
“On field and sprints we are hand and hand [with Penn],” she said.
The women are also hoping to get revenge for an event a few years ago which still burns brightly in the team member’s memory.
After taking the first and second spots in most of the sprints, the Quakers brought out brooms and started chanting “Sweep” to point out the victory.
“It was just very uncalled for,” Chatman said.
So while the women are aiming for revenge and the men want to make a statement, both squads feel that they are ready to put on a show at the Kane Sports Complex.
“This is the time for great performance by individuals as well as the team,” Ippel said. “It will definitely be confidence boost heading into Penn Relays and Heps if we can show what we are made of here.”
Archived article by J.V. Anderton