Sports | Track and Field
Track and field sweeps Greenville Select with numerous first-place finishes
The No. 2 Washington University women’s track and field team and No. 10 men’s team lived up to their national billing, each finishing first out of 12 schools at Saturday’s Greenville Select.
The women lapped the field with 228 points, nearly tripling the total of the second-best team. Six first-place finishes paced the Bears, including sophomore Julia Dannenbaum’s 3.80-meter pole vault, good for fourth-best in Division III. Dannenbaum also owns the second-best mark in the nation.

Tim Goblirsch pole vaults at the WashU Invite on Mar. 30. The track and field teams both finished first at Greenville Select.
Senior Jay Pittman had a strong day on two fronts. She ran the 100-meter hurdles in 14.89 seconds, the 21st-ranking time in DIII, still a hair slower than her previous 12th-best time. Pittman also led the four-by-100-meter relay team to victory in 48.79 seconds, another top-25 nationwide time.
Rounding out the Red and Green’s top finishers were a trio of upperclassmen: junior Payton Fors (3,000-meter steeplechase) and seniors Lisa Gorham (5,000-meter race) and Molly Shepherd (1,500-meter race).
The Bear men got seven first-place finishes of their own, also winning by a wide margin with 190 points ahead of Monmouth College’s 116.5. Host Greenville finished third with 86 points.
Junior Collis McKenzie delivered one of those first-place finishes with a personal-record 2.00-meter high jump. Like the women, the men also had one Bear contribute to two first-place events: sophomore Andrew Whitaker, who finished the 100-meter hurdles in 15.32 seconds and ran in the four-by-400-meter relay. That relay team was only slower than its previous DIII-leading time at 3:15.81.
The Bears also cleaned up in the 3,000-meter steeplechase, 5,000-meter race and 1,500-meter race, courtesy of junior Marco Quaroni, senior Chas Warden and sophomore Tucker Cera, respectively. Sophomore John Harry Wagner added a 400-meter win for good measure, producing the eighth-best mark in the country (to add to his previous fourth-best).
Wash. U. will spend the latter portion of the week traveling to La Crosse, Wis. and Terre Haute, Ind. for two final tune-ups prior to the University Athletic Association Outdoor Championships in Atlanta.