The women’s outdoor track and field team is looking to build upon the success they’ve enjoyed during an indoor season in which they once again won the conference championship.

To do so, they are going to rely on a strong and substantial freshman class to help bring energy, excitement and exuberance to a squad that has no lack of leadership from its upperclassmen.

Head Coach Jennifer Potter is relying on senior captains Caitlin Catella, Stephanie Donahue, Leigh Klumpp and Alison Spivak to help prepare the freshmen for what is a long and tiresome season.

“Our captains are integral parts of our practice sessions and team meetings,” she said. “They become especially important in trying to prepare such a young team.”

If the team hopes to experience the same success they have come to expect, Spivak said the team is going to have to avoid the injury bug that bit the team especially hard last season.

“We had a lot of injuries last year so hopefully we can take better care of our bodies,” she said. “We’re doing more pool workouts to save ourselves so we can perform well at our postseason meets.”

After losing several key seniors to graduation, such as sprinter Nicole Gundersen ’07, the team knows that it is imperative that the freshmen step right in and fill the void.

“Marcia McCord, Lucia Capano, Kristen DeStefano, Sarah Moskey, Jillian Rubin are all freshman who have shown a lot of promise for us,” Klumpp said.

The team has already seen junior NCAA qualifier Lauren Koppel sit out the season with an injury to her ACL. In her interim, she is serving as an assistant coach for the jumpers.

The team enjoyed several personal bests during their indoor season and hope to build off of this momentum in their upcoming outdoor season.

“We had a pretty solid season all around,” Potter said. “We had a lot of personal bests and national qualifiers. In the upcoming season I’m hoping to increase our depth because we have such a large freshman class.”

These freshmen are highlighted by McCord, a sprinter who broke three school records in her rookie season.

Potter said her job is to just keep harvesting the freshmen into stars, maintain her team’s tight make-up and most importantly to make sure they don’t lose sight that they are ‘student-athletes.’

“Our goals are really just to keep developing. We need to keep developing and working on our personal bests,” she said. “We need to follow up on academics and continue to increase our team unity.

The unity among the team is obvious when the athletes talk about each other.

“Stephanie Donahue, Nancy Andersen and Megan Murphy all have great leadership skills,” Spivak said. “All of our seniors, plus Alison Siderko [and] Hannah Jacobsen are expected to play a key role in our upcoming season. We want to continue building on our team unity and working at our goal of winning states.”

Winning states will not be easy for the Bombers. Standing in their way will be the defending conference champions, Rochester Institute of Technology, who will be returning several key runners this upcoming season.