Princeton University Athletics
Princeton University
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Women's Track & Field Completes Trifecta; First in 30 Years
May 08, 2011 | Women's Track and Field
NEW HAVEN, Conn. (5/8/11) - The Princeton women's track & field team has won the Ivy League triple crown, as the Tigers won the 2011 Ivy League Outdoor Heptagonal Championship. After winning cross country and the indoor title, this marks Princeton's second triple crown in program history, the first coming in 1980-81, a feat no other Ivy League school has done.
The Tigers finished with 132 points, 19 ahead of second-place Cornell. Brown was third with 101, followed by Columbia with 92, Penn with 84, Dartmouth with 74, Harvard with 71 and Yale with 46.
Senior Sarah Cummings was the runner up in the 5000-meter run and junior Alex Banfich finished sixth. Cummings ran 16:48.51 and Banfich clocked in at 16:53.34 to give the Tigers nine points in the first running event of the day, pushing Princeton into first place.
Princeton would maintain the first place standing throughout the day, but its margin in points would slowly decrease.
Later in the day Cummings would take third place in the 3000 at 9:51.57.
The 4x100 relay set a program record with a victory in the first relay of the afternoon. Abidemi Adenikinju, Erin Guty, Lily Miller and Eileen Moran posted a winning time of 46.31, 0.32 seconds ahead of second-place Penn and 0.26 seconds faster than the previous school record set in 1998.
Senior Ashley Higginson won her third straight steeplechase title. Higginson covered the course in 10:19.74, nearly six seconds ahead of the runner up. She joins only one other three-time winner in the steeplechase, Delilah DiCrescenzo of Columbia.
Sophomores Alexis Mikaelian and Greta Feldman finished in second and third place, respectively in the 1500. Mikaelian was narrowly defeated by Yale's Kate Grace by two-hundreths of a second. Mikaelian was the runner up at 4:20.79 while Feldman was third at 4:21.29. Both are PRs for the pair, who shaved nearly 10 seconds off their preliminary times.
Junior Eileen Moran became the first Tiger to win the 100-meter dash since Nicole Harrison in 1998. She ran 11.83, a 0.13 lead over the second-place runner from Cornell. Moran went on to take second in the 200 at 24.54. Also scoring in the 100 was Adenikinju with a time of 12.28.
The win by the 4x800 relay would seal the win for the Orange and Black. Kristin Smoot, Molly Higgins, Feldman and Mikaelian ran 8:38.33, nearly five seconds faster than Cornell's relay to get the 10 points, and a 21-point insurmountable lead over second-place Cornell. The time crushed the previous meet record by more than nine seconds.
The 4x400 would be the final event of the day and Princeton would take fifth in the race at 3:48.92 to get an additional two points.
Other Tigers contributing to the team score was freshman Imani Oliver in the triple jump. She reached 12.49 meters (40-11.75) to take fourth place. Freshman Chelsea Cioffi threw a PR of 42.44 (138-06) in the discus. Senior Bianca Mathabane added a point to the team total in the 100-meter hurdles and sophomore Joie Hand earned two points in the 400-meter hurdles with a fifth-place finish of 1:01.72.
This is the first time in Ivy League history that a school as won two triple crowns in the same year.