TWELVE SAINTS SET TO COMPETE AT TRACK ECACS

Emmanuel College will send twelve student-athletes to the Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference (ECAC) Track & Field Championships this Thursday and Friday.  Springfield College will play host to this highly competitive two-day New England meet, beginning on May 16 at Blake Track in Springfield, Mass.  Among the Saints qualified to compete are three individual athletes and three relay teams.

Leading the way for Emmanuel is junior Nathan Bruno (Lenox, Mass.), who will compete in an individual event and as a member of Emmanuel's 4x400m relay team.  Bruno won Emmanuel's first-ever outdoor track & field championship last week at Colby College, when he won the men's 400 meter hurdle event at the New England Division III Championships.  His program-record time of 51.87 was a meet record and briefly ranked him 1^st nationally in the event.

Rowan College's Demetrius Brooks later bumped Bruno from his national top spot by six hundredths of a second.  Brooks now sits at No. 2 nationally and 1^st in ECACs with 51.81, a time he ran at the New Jersey Athletic Conference Track & Field Championships on May 4.  The current national leader in the 400mH is Mount Union's Tyler Mettille, who ran a 51.48 on May 10^th at the 7^th Annual Gator Invitational.

Emmanuel sophomore Ryan Thomas (Wakefield, R.I.) will join Bruno in both the 400mH and 4x400m relay events. After running a personal record time of 53.41 for 3^rd place at the Division III New Englands, Thomas found himself ranked 13^th in the ECAC and is now sitting 22^nd nationally.

Rounding out the individual qualifiers for the Saints is sophomore sprinter Adam Julien (New Orleans, La.).  Julien, who has been nursing an injury of late, owns Emmanuel's records for the 400 meters, both indoor and outdoor.  His top outdoor time of 48.31 was set last season at the ECAC Championships.  Julien earned 8^th place last weekend in the New England Championships with his time of 49.49.

Bruno, Thomas and Julien will join forces with Ben Perdue (West Springfield, Mass.) as the Saints' qualifiers in the 4x400 meter relay.  The crew raced to 4^th place and All-New England status last week at the New England Championships with their time of 3:20.06.  This team owns the Emmanuel record of 3:19.73, which they set last year at the New England Division III meet.

Both, Emmanuel's men's and women's 4x800 meter relay teams have qualified for ECACs.  The women's team of Molly Metivier (Keene, N.H.), Chloe Egan (Burlington, Vt.), Julie Young (Derry, N.H.) and Meaghan Mauer (South Hadley, Mass.) is coming off their record-breaking performance of 9:55.69 last week at the New England Championships, which qualified them for ECACs.

The men's team of Chris Baker (Holden, Mass.), Tom Tallo (Lincoln, R.I.), Patrick Callan (Pawling, N.Y.) and David Allen (Hull, Mass.) earned their ECAC qualification last week as well.  Their top time this season is 8:04.58, which ranked them 12^th out of 20 teams at New Englands.

Emmanuel's schedule of ECAC events is as follows:

Thursday (May 16)

6:00 PM - men's 4x400m relay (Perdue, Bruno, Thomas, Julien)

Friday (May 17)

1:15 PM – men's 400 meters (Julien)

2:30 PM – men's 400 meter hurdles (Bruno, Thomas)

3:45 PM – men's 4x800m relay (Baker, Tallo, Callan, Allen)

4:05 PM – women's 4x800m relay (Metivier, Egan, Young, Mauer)

The full ECAC schedule of events can be found HERE.

Complete ECAC Rankings and the Division III National Rankings