Celine Lum earned the Point Loma women’s track and field team’s first NCAA Provisional Qualifying mark of the season as she cleared 12-2.5 (3.72m) in the pole vault at the San Diego Collegiate Challenge on March 11. PLNU finished third as a team. This was a career-best mark for the sophomore, which secured her third-place mark on the Sea Lions’ all-time top 10 list. It is the second straight season Lum has posted a provisional mark in the event. She took fourth place at the meet on Saturday, finishing behind a pair from San Diego State and Christina Carr of UCSD. Point Loma will host back-to-back meets. It will open with the Ross and Sharon Irwin Collegiate Scoring Meet on March 18. The following week it will host the PLNU Invitational. Benoit Bucher showed well in her second meet of the year, winning the 3k by nearly 17 seconds with a time of 9:59.22 to collect seven team points for the Sea Lions. In the same race, Josie Frye placed third by registering a career-best time of 10:17.88. It was 16 seconds faster than her previous personal record and earned four more points for the Sea Lions. Jordan Sienkiewicz placed fourth in the race with a time of 10:18.41. Brianna Bartello also won her race, the 1500m, with a time of 4:39.48. She edged out a duo from San Diego for the top spot, beating second-place Cindy Flores by just .01 seconds. Alex Hernandez was seventh in the race with a time of 4:43.86. She also placed fifth in the 800m with a time of 2:18.56 to account for five team points for PLNU. Point Loma also received a combined three points from freshmen Hailey Haakenson and Rikka Bergstrom in the long jump. Haakenson registered a mark of 16-7 (5.05m) to place seventh and Bergstrom finished ninth with a leap of 16-3.25 (4.96m). Amanda Timmons added three more points placing fifth in the discus and sixth in the javelin. As a team, Point Loma earned 64 points to place third at the meet. It finished behind UCSD (142) and San Diego State (128). “We had some good performances coming off our break, but you could tell they had been off for a week,” said Point Loma head coach Jerry Arvin. “We were okay today but we still have a lot of work to do to be where we want to as a team. We are just not at the level of a team like SDSU or UCSD at this point in the year.’
