The UMass Lowell women’s indoor track and field team participated in the Harvard Invitational in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Saturday, sending a select group of athletes to compete in both field and running events.
Associate Head Coach Ally Waruch commented on the team’s performance: “We saw some consistency across the board today. A few women have been in their upper range pretty regularly and others have been chipping away on improvements. After today I’m eager to see more progress in the coming weeks.”
In the field events, graduate student Fleur Balogh de Galantha placed 11th out of 43 competitors in the long jump with a mark of 5.22 meters. In the high jump, sophomore Chloe Champagne finished 12th with a mark of 1.50 meters. The triple jump saw freshman Nyrah Joseph leading the squad with a third-place finish at 11.12 meters, followed by junior Nethica Auguste in fourth place at 11.00 meters and sophomore Anya Neira finishing 17th with a mark of 10.11 meters.
For pole vault, junior Úna Brice achieved 19th place with a jump of 3.00 meters while sophomore Jaden Kasule took 26th, also at 3.00 meters. Junior Nhyira Nkansah stood out among shot putters by earning seventh place with an 11.95-meter throw; freshman Alessandra Forgione also competed and finished in 11th place with a throw of 11.51 meters. Sophomore Avery Pitts was UMass Lowell’s sole competitor in the high jump invite, earning fifth place out of 13 participants with a height of 1.67 meters.
On the track, graduate student Kaitlyn Stevens represented UMass Lowell in the 3,000-meter race and finished in 39th place with a time of 11:29.66. In the 400-meter event, freshman Kathryn Perrone placed 35th (1:03.63) and junior Soria Roberts was close behind in 44th (1:05.58).
Nyrah Joseph and Fleur Balogh de Galantha were top finishers for UMass Lowell in the first round of the women’s 60-meter hurdles; Joseph came in at 24th out of 73 runners (9.17 seconds), while Balogh de Galantha was just behind her at 27th (9.25). Senior Paige Murphy finished in 51st (9.85), followed by junior Shayla Quill who set a personal best for herself at ninth-tenths-of-a-second flat for her heat (9.90) and took home position number fifty-two.
Junior Jayani Santos performed well in the women’s sixty-meter dash by finishing twentieth out of sixty-four runners with a time of seven-point-eight-eight seconds.
In the two-hundred meter run, sophomore Meredith Feener led UMass Lowell athletes by placing thirty-first out of eighty-eight runners (26.46 seconds), trailed by junior Bridget Geary who finished thirty-seventh (26.62), and senior Danielle Thompson rounding out River Hawk performances at forty-third place (26.95).
The River Hawks will next host their own meet—the River Hawk Invite—beginning Friday, February sixth at The TRACK at New Balance facility located in Boston.
