Muhlenberg junior John Brodowski cleared 6 feet, 4¼ inches to win the high jump at the Centennial Conference Outdoor Track & Field Championships, hosted by Swarthmore.

After the first full day of competition, the Mule men are tied for second place – a distant second place behind perennial champion Haverford.

Sophomore Valerie Robuck finished fourth in the high jump for the second year in a row.

The women are sixth but have the potential to score many points on Sunday.

Brodowski has won the gold or silver in the high jump all six times he’s tried. He finished first both indoors and outdoors last year, and took second indoors in 2002 and 2004 and outdoors in 2002. Brodowski is the second Muhlenberg male athlete to win a CC field event three times, joining Kurt Kunsch (pole vault, 1998-2000).

Senior Joshua Boyer was third in the high jump, two spots behind

Junior Harry Kegelman was third in the decathlon.

Brodowski. He also placed seventh in the long jump. Senior Matt Frye finished a career-best second in the pole vault, qualifying for ECACs with a height of 13-3.

The 4x800-meter relay team of freshmen Lex Mercado, Steve Rothwell and John Dyer and senior Ben Phillips set a school record of 7:57.93, breaking the old mark by less than a second. They came in fifth.

Mercado also won his heat of the 800 meters with an ECAC-qualifying time. He will be joined by Phillips in Sunday’s final.

Unlike the men, who qualified runners for the finals in only one of the six events in which preliminaries were run, the women had qualifiers in all six.

Sophomore Danielle Seiler won her heat in both the 400 meters and 400-meter hurdles, posting ECAC-qualifying times both times. She had the top time in the 400 hurdles. Junior Katie Macomber and freshman Lily Hatfield also qualified in the 400 as well as the 200.

The Mules also will have three of the eight finalists in the 100-meter hurdles, with freshmen Jacquelyn Inverso and Rachel Drosdick, both of whom ran ECAC-qualifying times, and junior Ashlie Hankee. Hankee made the 100-meter final too.

In the 800 meters, senior Diana Garretto qualified for the final, then combined with junior Samantha Sachleben and sophomore Karen Mount and freshman Stephanie Conicella to shatter the school record in the 4x800 relay, the last event of the day. The quartet’s time of 9:50.23 was a full 12 seconds better than the previous mark and was good for a fourth-place finish.

Drosdick broke her own school record in the heptathlon with 3,425 points, although she slipped from her first-day lead and finished third.

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