It’s been
a very busy week (in a good way) so I don’t have much outside of track to talk
about …
Track
A lot has
happened in the past seven days with Wichita State Track &Field. Our athletes returned to campus, we had our
first official week of practice in 2014 and we had our first track meet of the
indoor season.
As I had
mentioned previously, the coaching staff always gets a little nervous wondering
how our athletes train over the winter break because of how short the indoor
season is once they get back (we have our MVC Championship meet in 5
weeks). I have the athletes I coach keep
a daily journal of their training. This
helps for a few reasons: 1) It keeps
them focused and being more of a student of their event through daily
discipline of writing a journal and analyzing their training. 2) I collect them every few weeks and it
helps me understand how they’re feeling and thinking – sometimes the athletes
don’t always communicate little injuries or other things that could be
bothering them. It’s very helpful when
they come back from the break so I can see exactly how their training went
while away. I always tell the athletes
to be as honest as possible, even if it means writing that they missed a
workout, so we can adjust training if necessary to avoid injuries.
Tuesday
was our first real tough speed endurance workout after the break and I’d say it
went decent. There were some really
great workouts and some workouts that didn’t go so well. That’s usually the case and this break we had
several kids who missed training because of a variety of sicknesses. The effort was good, however, and all we can
do is try to improve every week from here on out.
As for
our women’s team, we knew that losing some of last year’s seniors was going to
be tough to replace. After the meet we
now have an even clearer picture of how thin a margin of error we
have. We definitely have some very talented
young ladies but we will need to get much better to be a factor against Southern
Illinois, Indiana State and the rest of the MVC in 5 weeks. Hopefully our next meet at Nebraska this
weekend will be a positive step towards that result.
Having a
home meet is always great, but hosting the meet takes a lot of work by a lot of
people. Sometimes when I meet someone
for the first time and they find out I’m a college track coach I often get the
question, “So what else do you do besides coach track?” What a lot of people don’t realize is how
much work goes in to recruiting, hosting home competitions, administrative
duties and so on. A couple years ago I
detailed what a week in my life is like during May. I warn you it’s a very long blog but it will
give you an idea of what a 97 hour work week looks like (and I didn’t do
anything else besides track haha). Here is the link to that story.
Recruiting
is also in full swing right now and most of the rest of my weekend has been
busy with that. We only have a couple
weeks left until the beginning of our signing period so we are busy getting
recruits in and trying to convince them to be Shockers! We only graduate 7 women this year (out of
65) but we plan on signing around 15 men and 15 women. Currently we have about 6 women already
committed along with a couple guys. I
really wish I could go into more detail about recruiting because I think it’s
an interesting thing to learn about but NCAA rules prohibit me to publicly give
a lot of detail. One thing is for sure -
recruiting never stops!
Movies
Due to
the business of the week I did not see any movies. In fact I barely watched television or surfed
the Internet for non-work related items.
I’ve heard really good things about Lone
Survivor, the Mark Wahlberg war movie but I probably won’t be able to see
that for a while. The only other movie
that looks interesting to me is Her,
starring Joaquin Phoenix about a guy who falls in love with the operating
system of his phone/computer. Obviously
this is set in the future but I can imagine not too far into the future with
the way technology is taking over our lives.
Everything Else
Since
this week was pretty much totally about track and field there wasn’t much time
for anything else. I have to mention the
Shocker Basketball squad who is currently 19-0 and ranked 5th in the
nation (soon to be 4th this week).
I am so fortunate to be working at Wichita State during this special
time. I know the basketball coaches and
how hard they work so I’m very happy for them and the players. Our track kids are friends with most of the
basketball players too so it’s fun to see them excited and have so much school
spirit for Wichita State. I was also
lucky enough to be coaching at Kent State in 2002 when they won 26 games in a
row and came within a breath of the Final Four.
I guess that’s my good luck for being at two schools that either have no
football team or a historically bad football team. Ha!
Here’s an
example of how busy this week was. I did
a load of laundry on Wednesday and as I am typing this on Sunday evening it is
still sitting in the dryer. Totally
forgot they were in there. Anyone know a
good maid service?
Website of the Week
In
keeping with the sports statistics topic, this website, which is actually seven
websites, is a stat lovers dream. It’s
as complete a database of statistics on professional, college, and Olympic
sports as I’ve found on the Internet. It
isn’t very difficult to waste several hours just clicking on page after page of
stats and information. And the cool
thing was it was started by a fellow stat geek because of his passion and it
has grown into one of the most impressive websites I’ve ever seen. Another thing I love about it is that it is
almost totally text based without pictures, videos, etc to slow down your
viewing speed!
Interesting articles and other
things to waste some time with
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