The drought is over. Tufts’ 2013 NESCAC track and field title was 22 years in the making, and the Jumbos not only won big — the gap between them and second-place Bates was 47 points — but did so on home soil. They notched six victories — five individual and one relay — en route to a resounding win, letting no doubt linger about their superiority in the conference.
Galvanized by the stellar showings of junior Graham Beutler and senior Mike Blair, each of whom won two individual events, Tufts accrued 213 points, outstripping the defending champion Bates Bobcats by 47 points. Although the Jumbos tied Williams for a share of the conference crown in 2007, they hungered for the solo title that had eluded them for so long.
Beutler spearheaded an unusually effective sprint crew, which saw Beutler take home two individual titles — one in the 200, the other in the 400 — and lead the charge in the 4x400 to secure Tufts’ lone relay victory.
Beutler won the 200 by less than three tenths of a second, crossing the line just ahead of Middlebury’s Bryan Holtzman, the 100-meter champion. Joining him were junior Dan Lange Vagle and senior Vinnie Lee, who finished third and fourth, respectively, to give Tufts three of the top-four spots.
In the 400, Beutler won by a similar margin, this time over Jabulani Blyden of Williams. Tufts did not enjoy the same top-heavy placement, however, as there were 10 spots between Beutler and Tufts’ next entrant, freshman Woody Butler, who came in 11th.
Lange Vagle and Lee also fared quite nicely in the 100, finishing in second and third respectively. Two-hundredths of a second separated the top three runners in that event, with Lange Vagle and Lee themselves only six-hundredths of a second apart. Freshman Bryson Hoover-Hankerson ran in the preliminary round of the 100 as well, but his time of 11.42 seconds, good enough for 12th, landed him four spots short of the top eight that advanced to the finals.
Tufts’ distance squad also recorded a number of top finishes, highlighted by freshman Mitchell Black’s second-place finish in the 800 and junior Ben Wallis’ third-place finish in the 3000 meter steeplechase.
Black, who boasted the most eclectic docket on the day, participating in the 800, 4x4 and triple jump, narrowly missed out on adding yet another individual title to Tufts’ collection. He fell less than a tenth of a second short of overtaking Bates’ Mark McCauley for the victory.
Given the sheer distance of the event, Wallis spaced himself out enough between the second- and fourth-place finishers that he had all but wrapped up third well before the conclusion of the race. His time of 9:12.45, among top 10 nationally this season, came agonizingly close to dethroning his personal best from last spring, when Wallis posted a time of 9:12.24 at the ECAC Div. III Championship.
Other notable distance results include a fourth-place effort in the 10,000 and a sixth-place effort in the 5,000 from senior Matt Rand; a third-place effort from senior Kyle Marks in the 5,000; a seventh-place effort from junior Jamie Norton in the 1,500 and a fifth-place effort from senior Tyler Andrews in the 10,000.
Off the track, the Jumbos asserted themselves per usual and broadened the gap between them and their challengers. The jumpers in particular put on a clinic, collectively sweeping the three events and tallying 43 points.
Senior decathlete Michael Blair won the high jump by clearing the bar at 6 feet 4 inches and the long jump with his leap of 22 feet 5 1/4 inches. It was Blair’s third victory in the high jump at the NESCAC Championship and his first since 2011. He also backed up classmate Gbola Ajayi, to whom he surrendered victory at last year’s NESCAC Championship, with a fourth-place finish in the triple jump.
Ajayi was the runner-up to Blair in the long jump this time around, but he stood atop the leaderboard by the end of the triple jump — 3 feet 6 1/2 inches above the rest of the field.
“Personally, my goal this weekend was to defend my home runway, which I managed to do in triple,” Ajayi said. “I wanted to jump a little further than I did, but I was a little inconsistent with my runway and then tweaked my ankle, so we shut it down so as not to take any unnecessary risks. We already had the win in the bag.”
His winning mark of 47 feet 5 3/4 inches never looked in danger of being caught, much less approached, but fortunately for Tufts, Black and Blair secured second and fourth place, respectively, in an exemplary display of Tufts’ tremendous depth in the field events.
This depth has been perhaps no more embodied by Tufts’ throwers, who yet again put forth a rock-solid group performance.
Senior tri-captain Curtis Yancy and sophomore Brian Williamson, as they have done so consistently, comprised a formidable tag-team in the shot put, the discus and the hammer throw. They placed third and fourth respectively in the shot put, third and fifth respectively in the discus and third and second respectively in the hammer throw.
“Even though we’ve placed higher in other meets (in some cases winning throws events) this was definitely the best all-around performance we’ve had all year,” Williamson said. “Maybe not everybody hit what he was trying to hit individually, but everybody still got exactly what the team needed from them.”
Though it was a dominant victory against some of its greatest rivals, the Jumbos’ season does not end here, as they will look to build off this win this coming weekend at the Div. III New England Championship hosted by Colby.
“This championship was the culmination of four years of dedication to the program from the seniors, but more importantly the culmination of a great year in which we had the hardest-working team I have ever been on,” Ajayi said.
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