8 -- The Michigan Daily - SPORTSTuesday - Tuesday, January 18, 1994 Men's track uses Invite to prepare for season By TOM SEELEY hopes to achieve later this season, but DAILY SPORTS WRITER overall, he was pleased with his per- YPSILANTI - Even though it is formance. still early in the season, the Michigan "For so early in the season, it was men's indoor track team is confident adecenteffort,"Lancastersaid. "Early that last year's finish in the lower half in the season you have to accept that of the Big Ten will not repeat itself you're not going to perform as well as this year. you'd like to, but these smaller meets Friday at the Eastern Michigan are great building blocks for the later, Invitational in Ypsilanti, several of more important (meets)." the young Wolverines showed why Friday markedthedebutof sprinter this season may be more successful and ex-football player Felman than the ones the team has witnessed Malveaux. Thejunior had been slowed in past years. by a bout with the flu that had pre- Among the youngsters who vented himfromrunning in last week's opened the 1994 campaign with solid intrasquad meet. performances was sophomore Jon Malveaux may be joined in thej Royce. He followed up a victory in sprints by his ex-teammate on the last week's intrasquad meet with an- football team, Tyrone Wheatley. Hej other victory after a jump of 7'2", an has expressed his interest in running NCAA provisional qualifying height, track to the coaches, but his status for in the high jump. this season is still up in the air. Fellow sophomore Trinity "We're waiting to see what he Townsend set a meet record in the decides to do," Warhurst said. "He 600 meters with a time of 1:20.57. has had to make a lot of serious deci- With the first scoring meet of the sions about his career recently, but season one week away, Friday's meet he's so darn talented it wouldn't take was a chance for the Michigan coaches more than two or three weeks to get to see their young squad perform be- him in shape, so we're not really wor- fore the heart of the season begins. ried about that." "It was just kind of a low-key Overall, the team is really geared situation to get us started," Michigan toward a good performance at the Big assistant coach Ron Warhurst said. Ten Indoor Championships which it "It's an opportunity to find out where is hosting Feb. 25-26. we're going to put a few people this "We're a much-improved team," upcoming weekend." Warhurst said. "We're looking to fin- Winning the shot put was Wolver- ish in the top three in the Big Ten, inejunior Chris Lancaster with athrow which would be nice because you of 52' 7.5". The effort was a few feet don't want to finish eighth or ninth in shorter than the distances Lancaster front of your home crowd." Women runners take first in Michigan Relays By BRIAN SKLAR FOR THE DAILY The Michigan women's indoor track and field team showed that it is the strongest team in Michigan as it dominated intrastate rivals Michigan State, Eastern Michigan and Hillsdale College at the Michigan Relays Sat- urday. The Wolverines faced their first opposition of the season and were well prepared. Michigan coach James Henry was pleased to see the team make "signifi- cant progress since the intrasquad meet." In the field events, Ronda Meyers won the shot put. High jumpers Monica Black and Linda Stuck tied for the best jump as they both finished with marks of five feet -eight inches. Laura Jerman also had a good per- formance as she jumped 17 feet and 11 and 1/4 inches in the long jump. Eastern Michigan's Joy Inniss won the triple jump. The Wolverines continued to show their excellence in the distance events. Cross country All-American Courtney Babcock, who had a very solid performance in the intrasquad meet a week before, carried that mo- mentum into Saturday's competition and set a provisional qualifying time record in the 3,000 meter run with a time of 9:26.53. Molly McClimon, another cross* country All-American, impressively won the mile run in 4:44.48 as she also set a provisional qualifying time record. McClimon was "happy" with her accomplishment and was somewhat surprised she did so well. "I felt better than I expected," she said. Henry was not surprised with the performances of the distance runners. "It's difficult to find competition for the distance and middle distance events," Henry said. Michigan State coach Judi Brown King was glad to have such "good competition" for her team. For Henry, this meet "cleared things up" for what to expect this season. The Wolverines are confi- dent about achieving their pre-season goal- to win the indoor meet at the Big Ten championships. And for Henry, the key to doing this is to "continue to improve." SARAH WHITING/Daily The Michigan women's track team captured the Michigan Relays Saturday. Women tumblers escape meet with narrow victory By MELANIE SCHUMAN DAILY SPORTS WRITER A one-point victory was hardly the way the Big Ten champion Michi- gan women's gymnastic team wanted to start its 1994 campaign, but this first win only opened the Wolverines eyes to the task at hand. Michigan traveled to the Blue/ Gold Invitational this weekend at coach Bev Plocki's alma mater - West Virginia- totake on the Moun- taineers and Pittsburgh, in what was surprisingly a tight competition. "Two important things came out of this meet - we got the first meet under our belt and came out un- scathed," Plocki said. Pittsburgh, who did not compete with a full lineup because of injuries, posed little threat, but West Virginia strongly challenged the confidence of the Michigan squad. "Even though it was a close win...we know what we have to do," freshman Andrea McDonald said. "But no matter how you do, every- body believes in you." Many of the gymnasts accredited unpredictable falls and breaks to the "first-meet jitters" in a contest during which they performed innovative tum- bling passes and more difficult rou- tines. This was done in order to test themselves under new United States Gymnastics Federation scoring. "Some of the mistakes are pretty representative of the first meet of the season," Plocki said. "There are a couple of spots we can definitely strengthen in our lineups." Debbie Berman, who finished fourth all-around said, "The one thing we're coming off of this is that the breaks we made are correctable." Consistency was one suggestion offered by Beth Wymer, who cap- tured the top scores on all four indi- vidual events. Throughout the meet, gymnasts suffered from atypical falls and missed nailing tumbling routines. After the first event, Michigan led West Virginia by two points, but the* Mountaineers overtook the Wolver- ines by a half-tenth of a point after three rounds. Plocki and her staff anticipated minor problems before the meet and are optimistic that practice will pro- vide the opportunity to correct this weekend's mishaps. Blue gymnasts capture fourth at Wind City Inivitational 0 By AARON BURNS DAILY SPORTS WRITER The Michigan men's gymnastics team overcame a slow start at the Windy City Invitational Saturday to finish fourth in a 12-team field. The Wolverines finished strong to compile 271.925 points, finishing behind champion Ohio State (280.35), Iowa (276.075) and Minnesota (273.825). The Wolverines quickly fell be- hind in the competition to eighth place after scoring a meager 43.8 on the pommel horse, the afternoon's open- ing event. "We put ourselves at a disadvan- tage," Cory Huttenga said. "But we did rebound." The Wolverines' comeback opened more than a few eyes at this meet hosted by Illinois-Chicago. After the fifth event - the high bar-Michigan found itself in fourth place, just four points behind a Min- nesota team that the Wolverines had defeated last week. Even though Michigan did not win the overall title, it received some solid performances. Ben Verrall, Raul Molina and Rich Dopp all reached the finals in the floor exercise. Verrall finished third overall in the floor exercise while Molina com- peted in the high bar finals. Mike Mott performed in the finals in the team's Achilles' heel --- the pommel horse. "If we had performed better on the pommel horse and parallel bars, we would have finished third," Huttenga said. Although Michigan missed 12 of its 36 routines- two more than it did in its previous meet - coach Bob Darden was encouraged with the over- all results. 09 . . + MA Theirs. Ours. First relational database. First to implement SQL. First portable database software. First database compatible with massively parallel computing. First database to perform 1,000 transactions per second. First cooperative-server database. But Oracle is notjust about databases. We're also first in advanced networking, CASE, application development, office automation, development tools, multimedia. You can see, we're also about success. BS/MS CS/EE. You can become a: Software Developer * Technical Analyst * Consultant * Product Manager i i