January 13, 2001

After a three and a half week break, the Engineers came back to Cambridge in better shape than expected as they qualified seven more individuals for the New England Division III Championships on February 16 and 17. The Beaver Relays, an annual competition hosted by MIT, is a non-scoring invitational with a full schedule of events including a pentathlon, shuttle hurdle relay and the field events competed in relay fashion where the top three competitors from a team combine their distances or heights to produce a team total. In addition to MIT, other teams were Fitchburg State College, the University of Southern Maine and the United States Coast Guard Academy.

To start things off , the pentathlon was dominated by MIT athletes. Rick Rajter '03, and Craig Mielcarz '03, the defending New England Div. III champion and runner-up, in reverse order, combined once again to go 1-2 in this meet. Rick, finishing first this time, scored 3299 to easily make the 2900 point qualifying mark for this year's championship. Craig was close behind with 3244 points and Tony Pelosi '01, also qualified with 2941 points.

In the Weight Throw, Brian Wong 'G, improved his qualifying mark with a 49-3 3/4 personal best to finish second. Also with a personal best in the event was David Saylor '04, with a throw of 36-9.

The pole vaulters had a good day. Sam Thibault 'G, finished second with a jump of 13-6. Dan Opila '03, improved his season best with a vault of 13-6 as well. Opila's vault joined Thibault and Dan Kwon as New England Division III qualifiers.

Mark Washington '03, ran 6.70 to finish second in the 55 meter dash and qualify for the NE Div. III Championships. Freshman Andrew Francis ran a personal best of 6.71 to miss qualifying by .01 seconds. Mark and Andrew also ran personal bests in the 200 with 23.45 and 23.86 respectively, but the performances were short of the 22.94 necessary to qualify for the championship.

Yuval Mazor '02, was back from an early season injury to win the 400 with a 52.31. Another winner was Brian Hoying '03, in the High Jump. Brian jumped 6-6 for the second time this year. Sean Montgomery won the Mile run, but his time of 4:30.20 was less than spectacular.

The Engineers dominated the distance events, winning both the 3000 and 5000 meter runs. In the 3000, Dan Feldman '02, ran a championship qualifying time of 8:44.80 despite a head cold. Liyan Guo, '01, led a 1-2-3 sweep in the 5000 with a 15:47.72 performance. Albert Liu '03, and Ed Keehr '01, finished with times of 15:58.30 and 16:04.79 respectively.

Freshman Brian Anderson had a spectacular day, winning the 800 with a qualifying time of 1:57.76, and then coming back to lead the 3200 Relay team to victory with a 1:58 effort. The quartet of Anderson, Montomery, George Hanson '03, and John Biesiadecki '01, ran a 8:07.77, which will surely get the unit into the fast section of the Division III Championship.

In all, Tech won every running event above the 200 meters, including all relays and the pentathlon. The field events were not quite as successful with only 1 victory out of six events. However, much of the strength in the field events was held out of individual competition since they had competed in the pentathlon earlier.

Next week, MIT travels to Bates to face the Bobcats as well as the Coast Guard Academy in a scoring meet.