Juniors Jillian Schwartz and Mike Zulandt have two things in common: they had never competed in their respective sports before coming to Duke and they captured All-East honors in this weekend's IC4A and ECAC invitational meets.
The IC4As (for men) and the ECACs (for women), held this year in Boston, test the best athletes in about 100 northeast and mid-Atlantic Division I schools.
Sheela Agrawal, Katie Atlas, Lamar Grant and the men's distance medley relay team also finished with top-six performances, which qualified them for All-East honors.
Schwartz finished first among the 38 pole vaulters, clearing 12' 5" and smashing her old school record of 11' 10". The jump qualified as an NCAA provisional height, but she ended up missing the NCAA cut by three inches.
"I was really excited," Schwartz said. "This was a really big personal record for me."
Schwartz also won last year's outdoor ECACs. She arrived at Duke in the same year that the NCAA decided to sanction pole vaulting. With her speed and gymnastics background, she was a natural.
"She was able to pick up the pole vault really easily," said women's track coach Jan Samuelson-Ogilvie. "She has made remarkable progress this year. It's a feather in her cap to have won two ECAC championships."
Zulandt finished fifth in the pentathlon with 3,669 points, setting five personal bests and beating the old school record by nearly 100 points. He nearly won the 1,000 meter run, the final event of the pentathlon, finishing just .02 seconds behind the winner.
Katie Atlas finished fifth, running a 2:10.35 in the preliminaries and a 2:11.19 in the finals of the 800. Sheela Agrawal's 4:52.38 was good for sixth place in the mile. Her prelim time of 4:45.58 qualified her for the NCAA Championships.
Senior Lamar Grant twice lowered the school record in the 200, running 21.86 in the prelims and then 21.83 in the finals. He finished in sixth place for the second year in a row.
"For the first time in his career, he'll get to run a full outdoor track season," men's associate coach Norm Ogilvie said of Grant, who previously had spring football practice.
"I look forward to see what he can do. He's in the best shape of his life."
The men's distance medley team finished a disappointing fifth place, considering they were seeded second in the race. Mike McKeever, who runs the lead-off leg, got sick and ran eight seconds off his normal split in the prelims. The team, consisting of freshman Donnie Fowler instead of McKeever in the finals, ultimately fell two seconds short of qualifying for NCAAs.
"Shoulda, coulda, woulda," Ogilvie said. "There's always next year."
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