By Anna Dunlavey

This past weekend, the Lords track team competed in the North Coast Athletic Conference (NCAC) Quad Meet at the College of Wooster. The team finished in fourth place out of the four teams present, with a total of 52 points.

Head Coach Duane Gomez said one struggle for the Lords right now is the limitation of their roster. “The thing about us is that we don’t have a lot of depth, so we had to depend on a lot of individual strengths,” he said. “Right now, individually, we’re doing pretty well.”

The distance medley relay (DMR) team of Nat Fox ’16, Alton Barbehenn ’17, Sam Lagasse ’16 and Noah Winters ’15 proved that it will be a force to be reckoned with. The team raced for the first time this season on Saturday. The DMR is comprised of four runs of different lengths. The first runner, Fox, goes 1,200 meters. The second, Winters, goes 400 meters. The third, Barbehenn, goes 800 meters. The final runner, Lagasse, goes 1,600 meters. “It’s a really fun race to run with all your friends,” Winters said.

The Lords’ DMR team finished second at the Quad Meet with a time of 10:45.50, and is now ranked second in the conference. The Lords fell only to Ohio Wesleyan, the DMR team ranked first in the conference. Ohio Wesleyan won the Quad Meet overall as well, finishing with 204 points. Allegheny College placed second with 135 points, and host-school Wooster finished third with 93 points.

The Lords saw some individual successes as well. Oliver Hightower ’18 had the team’s top individual performance, in the 200-meter dash, he placed second with a time of 23.50. Winters finished close behind in third place with a time of 23.98. “I didn’t really have any expectations,” Winters said of his 200-meter finish. “But for now I’m content with it.”

Kevin Phillips ’15 finished fourth in the high jump, clearing a height of 1.73 meters. Colton Orr ’18 also claimed a fourth-place finish for the Lords; his came in the 60-meter hurdles, for which he had a time of 8.94.

This was the first meet that the Lords’ entire roster attended. Although the Lords have competed in two other meets this season — an unscored meet at Tiffin University and last week’s Ohio Wesleyan Triangular at Ohio Wesleyan University — only a few of the team’s runners were able to attend.

Gomez said individual successes like the ones the Lords had on Saturday are good for the team right now. “When you focus on the individual events, the whole team gets stronger as a whole,” he said.

“I think this was the first one where we got to see people going out and racing and competing well,” Winters said. “It was a lot of fun seeing what people could do.”