The Boston College women’s track team finished the distance medley relay race in 11th place at the NCAA Championships this past weekend.  The NCAA Championship tournament took place from March 12th-13th in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Tennessee women’s track finished the medley relay in first place, with Oregon and Georgetown coming in second and third, respectively.  However, Oregon ultimately won the women’s team title.  The BC women finished with a time of 11:23 minutes to take 11th place.

The NCAA Championships were held on the campus of the University of Arkansas, as they are every year.  The college town of Fayetteville is commonly referred to as the “Track Capital of the World” since Arkansas’ track and field program has won a total of 42 national championships to date.

This year, the NCAA Championships featured over 200 teams hailing from most of the Division I schools in the nation.  Many of the schools present had more than a handful of talented athletes competing in the tournament, but Boston College just had four girls representing the entire college—the team of Caitlin Bailey, Anna Cioffredi, and sisters Caroline and Jillian King.

These four girls qualified for the NCAA tournament the week before nationals at the East Coast Atlantic Conference (ECAC) Championships, but just for one event—the indoor 200-meter distance medley relay race.  However, this year’s tournament just had twelve schools with teams running in the medley.

The distance medley relay race consists of four parts—the 1200m, 400m, 800m and mile-long legs of the race, in that order.  Jillian King, Anna Cioffredi, Caitlin Bailey and Caroline King ran each of these legs, respectively.

At the ECAC Championships the week before the NCAA tournament, the four girls finished their distance medley relay race with a time of 11:05.69 minutes—the fastest distance medley relay time this season in the entire Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) and one that broke the school’s 14-year-old record.  Now if the girls had run their qualifying time of 11:05.69 minutes from the ECAC Championships in the NCAA Championships, then they would have placed fourth and been All-Americans.

The record-setting pace placed the girls as the fifth seed at the NCAA Indoor Championships.

“At the beginning of the season, we set as our team goal the time of roughly 11.11 minutes, so with the time that we scored at the conference championships we definitely exceeded our expectations,” said senior Caitlin Bailey. She is a pre-med biology major in the College of Arts and Sciences and specializes in the 800-meter leg of the medley.

Bailey is no stranger to the NCAA Championships, though.  She has qualified for the NCAA tournament for all four years that she has been at Boston College, even qualifying as a freshman.

Just last year, she completed a strong indoor track season with a ninth-place finish in the 800 meters, scoring a preliminary time of 2:05.67 minutes.  That time beat out the old record of 2:05.71 minutes set at the McFerrin Complex on the Texas A&M campus, and established a new Boston College record in the process.

“I am just grateful to have had the opportunity to run side-by-side with these girls. I am proud to have made it this far,” said sophomore Anna Cioffredi, an English and women’s studies major who specializes in the 400-meter leg of the race.

“The overall experience and the excitement that comes along with it is something that we are never going to forget, and we are going to work just as hard next year to get back into the position that we put ourselves in this year to succeed,” said junior Caroline King, a communications major who specializes in the mile-long leg of the distance medley relay race.

Her sister, sophomore Jillian King, added that, “For me personally, the best part of it is going through the whole season together as a team.  You always know that your teammates are going to support you and have your back, through all the ups-and-downs.  During the cross country season, it is just me, all alone and it can be tough.” The younger King sister is a pre-med biology major and specializes in the 1200-meter leg of the race.

All in all, the team voiced its satisfaction with their season, and had no regrets.