Track
It was a
crazy week of track and field for the Shockers.
It
started out innocently enough with practice on Monday but that evening Wichita
was hit with several inches of snow and school was cancelled for Tuesday and
Wednesday. Although it wasn’t a blizzard,
the city of Wichita is not very well equipped to deal with any amount of snow
since it doesn’t occur very often. So
when we get even a small amount it can turn most of the city into Armageddon! For someone who grew up in Ohio and went to
college in the Snow Belt, it
always makes me chuckle about how little snow we
can have for school to get cancelled.
Even though school was cancelled it didn’t necessarily mean practice
would be also. Unfortunately, our indoor track, the Heskett
Center, is operated by the university and not the athletic department so we
were not able to practice either day at our track. After completely taking Tuesday off we were
able to practice Wednesday at our indoor baseball facility. It was better than nothing, and we were
thankful to practice, but it wasn’t the same working out in a smaller turf
field as compared to our 200m Mondo track.
We had to completely alter our training plan but we made the best of it
and focused on our trip to Colorado Springs.
We left
for the Air Force Academy the next morning and were welcomed by -7 degree
weather and 7000 feet altitude. Now
obviously we are running indoor track so the temperature wasn’t difficult to
deal with but the altitude is something that can affect even the best athletes. We didn’t even take many of our distance
runners because of how difficult it is for them to compete at that altitude.
As for
the meet itself, we came away feeling just so-so about our performance. We finished a close 3rd (out of 4)
on both sides. Our conference rival
Indiana State won both meets. We were
hoping to win but knew it would be tough to pull off. There were a lot of good marks put up but we
know we still have a ways to go to be where we want in three weeks at the MVC
Indoor Championships.
Colorado
Springs is about 7 hours from Wichita and after the meet we drove through the
night to get home. We arrived back in
Wichita at 7:30am so the rest of the weekend has been about resting and trying
to get back on schedule. Big time
college athletics is not always glamour and glitz, especially when you watch
the sunrise on the way home. Yes it was
a strange week indeed.
We are
only 20 days away from the start of the MVC Championships and it should be very
interesting indeed. Every Sunday I closely
analyze how the rest of the conference is doing and this year has been very
different from years past. The MVC has
always been a very good track and field conference yielding individual national
champions and numerous top-20 team finishes over my 8 years in the league. And while that national success is
impressive, the strength of the conference is the abilities of each school to
build an overall team to compete at the conference level. This makes winning championships very tough
yet very rewarding.
For the
last several years, the men’s indoor championship has been a 4-team battle
between Wichita State, Indiana State, Northern Iowa and Southern Illinois with
all four of those teams winning championships in the past 5 years. This year looks to be different with the
addition of Loyola and the significant improvement of Illinois State. If I had to predict right now this would be
the men’s standings: 1) Indiana State 2)
Wichita State 3) Loyola 4) Southern Illinois 5) Illinois State 6) Northern Iowa
7) Drake.
While
Indiana State beat us this weekend and they look like the favorites on paper,
they don’t give out the trophies for what you do during the regular season and
our men are still optimistic they will give a championship effort in three
weeks. We have traditionally competed
well at the MVC Indoor Championships and I expect we’ll do so again this year.
Putting
our team in third doesn’t make me feel very good but remember I’m trying to
look at it objectively at the moment. I
do think our ladies can win a championship but we’ll have to improve over the
next 3 weeks to do it. The difference
between first-sixth is probably 35-40 points, so we will have our hands full
with several teams. This kind of close
competition makes for a very stressful yet exhilarating championship week!
This week
our team will split up to try and focus on some individual competitions. We will take a group of sprinters to Iowa
State, a group of distance runners to Grand Valley, Michigan, and a few field
event athletes to the University of Oklahoma.
The following week will be a tune-up meet for a few athletes so this
weekend is really our last big weekend of competition before the MVC
Championships. Hopefully we’ll have more
of a normal week of practice and be ready to go!
Movies
When
school and practice got cancelled on Tuesday, I took the opportunity to see the
movie “Her”. This movie stars Joaquin Phoenix (Johnny Cash
in Walk the Line) and is set “a few years into the future.” The basic story is how this guy,
who is in
the process of getting a divorce, buys a new operating system for his
computer/phone/etc that has a level of artificial intelligence that gives it a
personality. Phoenix then starts to
develop feelings and a special connection to “Her” and eventually falls in love
with his operating system. While I was
watching the movie my main thoughts were about how I’ve never seen a movie like
this before and I hope that our society never gets to this point. All in all I thought it was a very good movie
and I’m glad I saw it. Not all movies
should make you feel happy throughout and I think the people who made this
movie did a good job of making us think about how technology is affecting our
lives. Hopefully “in the future” we will
look back at this movie as a joke, but right now I imagine it could happen –
and sooner than we might think! I give
Her 8/10.
I rode
the bus with the team this week and we ended up watching a couple movies on the
trip. The first was “Bad Grandpa” from the guys who made the Jackass movies. It’s a very crude comedy with Johnny
Knoxville dressed up like a dirty old man playing pranks on unsuspecting
bystanders. Turns out it was a pretty
good movie if you have an open mind about adult humor. Watching it with a bus full of college kids
made for an interesting experience. On
the way back we watched “Hunger Games 2”
but I was falling asleep every 10 minutes and didn’t really get to see the
whole thing. What I saw was pretty good
but these kinds of movies aren’t in my wheelhouse.
Everything Else
The
Winter Olympics got started this week and I have watched bits and pieces of the
first few days. I get frustrated
watching the Olympics because of how it is tape delayed and edited with NBC
focusing on mostly Americans or people that have unique stories. My frustration probably stems from the Summer
Olympics coverage of track and field and how they try to play to the masses and
thus don’t really show the real competition.
I tell people all the time that track and field on TV needs to be shown
like golf. In golf coverage they show
all the shots, good and bad, and it builds drama throughout the competition and
the focus is on winning, not the score.
In track we get too concerned with how fast
someone is running or how
far someone is jumping when we should focus on the competition. This builds drama and then people would start
watching more. Seeing one pole vault
attempt isn’t very interesting and doesn’t represent what really happens. This is what I see when I watch the Winter
Olympics. Just show the events instead
of dumbing it down to the masses. Let’s
build a more intelligent audience that doesn’t think the USA is the only
country competing. The reason March
Madness is so exciting and highly watched is because no one knows what is going
to happen next.
The other
thing with watching the Olympics is how many dang commercials there are. I am a guy that changes the channel as soon
as a commercial comes on so needless to say the Olympics and their multitude of
frequent advertising lost me several times.
I know the powerful TV executives aren’t listening to me but if they
were, just know that if they put a sponsor logo in the corner of the screen
during the competitions it would be far more effective than any commercial
(which I wouldn’t see anyways).
Shocker
basketball continues to roll on. This
week they took care of Indiana State and Northern Iowa in two tough road games
to improve to 25-0. They are up to #2 in
the USA Today Coaches Poll and #4 in the AP.
What an awesome thing we are seeing here in Wichita this year. And for those who are knocking the Shockers' weak schedule, just keep in mind that Creighton, who finished 2nd to WSU in the Valley last year, is currently the best team in the Big East. Keep it going guys, what a remarkable
accomplishment!
Website of the Week
If you
are a Cincinnati sports fan then you probably know who Paul Daugherty is. He’s the long time columnist for the
Cincinnati Enquirer and a terrific writer who blogs most mornings on
Cincinnati.com. It is usually one of the
things I read during my lunch break at work and, even if I don’t agree with
what he says, I am always entertained. I
met him and his wife in an airport one time and he was very gracious. When he found out I grew up in Brown County
he was immediately interested because he bought some land in Adams County a few
years ago. Nice guy, terrific writer.
Interesting articles and videos to
waste some time with
Crazy ending to the Weber St/Sacramento St basketball game - video (2:30)
2014 IQ Test - I got 120 so I doubt it's very legit
NBA statistics are starting to get a little crazy - for stat geeks like me
Comedians in Cars with Seinfeld interviewing Howard Stern - video (14:48)
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