MuscoSportsPhotos.com

With over a month since their last competition, the Yale track and field teams will head to Hanover, NH this weekend to compete with fellow Ivy League teams Dartmouth College and Columbia University. 

In their first meet of the season, fittingly dubbed the Yale Season Opener and hosted at home in New Haven, Yale’s men’s and women’s track and field teams had very strong showings across the board. Now, after 42 days, the Elis are back in action, kicking off the 2023 indoor track season. They hope to build upon the strong start they established back in December.

“This entire team has been waiting to compete for a long time and everyone is ready to come out of the gate strong after the break,” Kalei Memmer ’25 wrote to the News. “The season opener is always a good gauge of how things are going, and I am excited to see what happens during the rest of the indoor season.”

Although they’ve had a significant amount of time off since their last competition, many athletes on the team expressed the desire to not only pick up from where they left off, but to improve on their times from the first meet of the season.

When asked how the team planned to accomplish this, Matt Appel ’24, a thrower on the men’s team, cited consistent and intentional winter break training as the separating factor.

“We’re looking to improve on our strong opener by being consistent in our training all throughout the break, both at home and on campus,” Appel wrote to the News. “A lot of us got back early from our break to make sure that we were giving our training the proper attention before we compete.”

On the women’s side, the first meet of the year was marked by strong performances across the board, with the throws, jumps, pole vault and sprint squads all coming in with impressive finishes — setting themselves up as teams to look out for in this weekend’s meet. One group that stood out in particular was the middle distance squad, where Ruby Barton ’26 and Kaity Chandrika ’25 both took home first place in their respective events, the 1000m and 1600m respectively.

While the women’s team features a variety of returners and rookies, two notable first years to watch out for are Makayla White ’26 and Casia Provencal ’26, who took home second and third place respectively in the 60m dash. With their first collegiate meet in the books, these two look to improve upon their already impressive finishes this weekend.

“Now that we have the first meet in the books, we can really focus on the technical aspects of our races rather than the nerves that we might have felt at our first collegiate meet,” Provencal wrote to the News.

As for the men’s team, they showed similar dominance across the board in the first meet. The group notched first place finishes in throwing, jumping, sprint, middle distance and distance events, poised as a whole for another strong team showing this weekend.

Having competed in and won this same meet last year, Appel has high expectations of his squad this weekend.

“My goals for this weekend are to win,” Appel wrote to the News. “Obviously I want to throw more PR’s, but above all the most important thing in a meet like this against Ivy League opponents is scoring points for the team… Our goal for this weekend is to come out strong and get a win against two teams that we beat in this meet last year.”

After the meet this weekend in New Hampshire, the Elis will head to Cambridge on Jan. 28 to face off against two more major Ivy League rivals, Harvard and Princeton.