Track
It was
another exciting weekend at the MVC Indoor Championships, I’ll try to document
some of the things that the typical fan or parent might not be aware of during
the very important week.
If you’ve
been reading this blog with some regularity, you’ll know that we were decisive
underdogs heading into the MVC Indoor Championships this past weekend at
Northern Iowa and the pre-meet coaches poll had our men picked second and our
women third – and on paper that appeared to be accurate. We are always very honest with our team so
they knew what a steep hill there would be to climb to have a shot at a
championship or even a trophy (top 2 finish).
The first
thing we noticed when we got to Northern Iowa was the weather! Wichita is not exactly Phoenix when it comes
to heat and humidity but it’s quite warmer than Northern Iowa. We experienced double digit negative
temperatures for multiple days while in Cedar Falls. Now you might be saying it’s an indoor meet
and how does that make any difference?
Well the way we are setup at this meet our kids have to walk to their
breakfast/lunch/dinner locations so the frigid temperatures were something we
had to be prepared for. I don’t remember
any of our kids complaining about the weather, they seemed tough all weekend.
One of
the best parts of our championship tradition is traveling as many people as we
can. We like to refer to it as our “Bowl
Game” and in that regard we want to have as many non-competing athletes and
staff members there as possible to support the team who is competing and learn
about what it takes to be successful at this meet in the future. We always have a huge travel party and are
very lucky our administration supports us in this philosophy.
So on
Friday night in our women’s team meeting (we have separate meetings for men and
women), our projection had a tight battle between Indiana State (136) and
Southern Illinois (135). We were down in
third place with 84 points with Illinois State (77), Loyola (69), Northern Iowa
(65), Missouri State (58), Bradley (35), and Drake (7) behind us. All indoor season this is how it has looked
as our women are a very young team (only 4 seniors in the group of 32
competitors) and, even though we didn’t like it, had sort of mentally been
settling into the fact it might be a “rebuilding” type of season. Luckily our women’s team didn’t look at it
like that – more on that in a bit.
In the
men’s team meeting we were in second place behind Indiana State (167-110) with
Northern Iowa (89), Loyola (87), Illinois State (86), Southern Illinois (76),
and Drake (55) trailing. On both sides
we were a little over 50 point underdogs on paper. Only one time, the men’s indoor championship
of 2010, have we ever turned around a deficit that large. To win either meet would require us to have
an extraordinary meet and for one of the top teams to struggle significantly.
The MVC
Indoor Championships is only a two-day meet so things happen very quickly once
the meet starts. Our goal in the first
day was to try and cut into the lead by about a third. There are 17 events in our meet and on day one
there are 6 finals and lots of preliminaries.
If we were going to have a chance at a title (or second place on the
women) we would have to have some massive “point swings”. The one event on the first day that was a big
swing was the women’s Pentathlon where we scored 24 points instead of the
projected 14. Mission accomplished, so
to speak.
In our
final team meeting on Saturday night we gave the team an update on how the meet
is going. Overall the first day went
pretty much according to the projections with the exception being the
Pentathlon. After day one we had Indiana
State and Southern Illinois tied with a projection of 134 points, so they were
pretty much in line with what we thought.
We had moved up from 84 to 97 so instead of being down over 50 points,
now it was 37. Even though that is still
a very large margin our women had cut into the lead by about the third that we
had needed. It was still a long way to
go for a trophy.
On the
men’s side, we pretty much held form and I had us projected for 109
points. Indiana State had a very good
day and moved up to 179 points in our charts.
A 70 point deficit was going to be very tough to overcome, especially
since our top athlete, Austin Bahner, would not contest the rest of the meet
with a hamstring injury. We had Bahner
penciled in for 18 points so our message to the team would be we need to really
pull together in order to finish second.
There were four teams lurking behind us by about 20 points and any of
those teams had the potential to beat us if we didn’t finish strong.
The final
day of a championship meet is full of excitement and intensity. We needed some big things to happen, and
happen quickly! Right away we had two
big things happen. Our best triple
jumper Shanice Andrews hit a huge personal best to win the event and Southern
Illinois had an 11 point fall in the Shot Put.
So with nine events left the projected margin for second place went from
37 down to 18. Those results seemed to
kick-start our women’s team and they proceeded to have an incredible day. By the middle of the final day our women had
surpassed SIU on the projection and looked in line for a second place
finish. Indiana State’s women appeared
to be too tough to catch and they were having a good day as well. There were lots of very close finishes in
several events and at the end of the day our women ended up in second place,
losing to Indiana State 130-116.5. We
had gone from over 50 points down to losing by 13.5, as well as beating SIU by
19 points in the process. We
outperformed our pre-meet chart by 32 points – the highest total for our women
in the eight years I’ve been at WSU. A
terrific accomplishment given that it was done with only 4 seniors (who scored
a total of 18 points).
The men’s
side, unfortunately, wasn’t as close.
Without Bahner we were doing everything we could to scrape together
points as best we could. Indiana State
did come back to us a bit but they finished with 151 points to our 105. We held off a strong charge by Southern
Illinois, who scored 95 points. Our men
had been very determined to win a championship this year but this one was not
to be. We think our outdoor team is
better than our indoor team with the addition of the Javelin and a few other
events. We will also add a couple of
redshirted athletes that should make our team better.
On the
way up to the meet our coaching staff had decided finishing second (men) and
third (women) would have been a pretty successful meet. On the drive home after exceeding those
predictions, we were happy but not satisfied.
Overall it was a great weekend of track and field for the Shockers!
Today
(Monday) has been mostly spent sleeping.
Last week
I mentioned I would probably talk a little bit about recruiting and our class
of signees but since we are off this next weekend I figured next week would be
a better time to talk about it. And
you’re probably ready for me to stop talking about track at this point anyways.
Movies
A sad
event occurred this week as writer and director Harold Ramis passed away at the
age of 69. Ramis was involved
with many
of my all-time favorite movies like Caddyshack, National Lampoon’s Vacation,
Animal House, Stripes, and Back to School.
I’ve always enjoyed seeing him in interviews talking about these movies
and he was, obviously, a major influence on the film industry. RIP Harold, you will be dearly missed!
With the
business of this week’s MVC Championships, there was no way I was going to be
able to get out and see any movies. I
did catch a few on cable and online though before and during the trip. I watched a movie called This Film Is Not Yet Rated, made in 2006 about the MPAA ratings
systems for movies (R, PG-13, etc). I
found it on YouTube and thought it was a very interesting documentary. Because of the subject matter it was rated
NC-17, which is kind of funny when you consider what the movie was about. It has a lot of adult material but I’d
recommend it. I’ve always respected
movies that were original and took risks.
I watched
most of the movie Road House,
starring Patrick Swayze. The fact that
is was being played on the American Movie Classics channel makes me chuckle,
because Road House is not exactly considered the best film in the world. Is has a certain kind of cult charm though,
and has developed a great following over the years. I have to admit I got drawn into it. On the road I watched the movie Election with Matthew Broderick and
Reese Witherspoon about a high school presidential election and the teacher who
is involved with organizing it. It was
directed by Alexander Payne, who later in his career directed movies Sideways and Nebraska, which I’ve talked about here before. Obviously I enjoy
his movies very much and this early version of his work is good as well.
Right now
I’m watching the Rocky marathon on AMC.
The Rocky movies are always great entertainment. I was also happy to hear Matthew McConnaughey
won an Oscar this week, he definitely deserved it for his role in Dallas Buyer’s Club.
DVD Choice of the Week (from my collection): In honor of Harold Ramis, this week’s movie
is Caddyshack. The classic 1980 comedy is one of my all-time
favorites, starring Chevy Chase, Rodney Dangerfield, and Bill Murray. If you get a couple of guys together who are
at least 30 years old you will probably hear several quotes from this movie in
their general conversation. “So I got
that going for me, which is nice” is usually one of our favorites. No need to talk about the plot here, if for
some reason you’re one of the 1% of Americans who’ve never seen this movie then
you can’t be helped.
Everything Else
The only
bad thing about being out of town for the MVC Championships was that we weren’t
able to be in Wichita Saturday for the regular season finale of what has been
one of the most remarkable seasons of college basketball ever. If you’re not aware, Wichita State finished
the regular season with an undefeated record of 31-0. It’s the first time a school has won that
many games and gone undefeated in the regular season – ever. Bobby Knight, the former Indiana coach, was
in town to do the ESPN broadcast and, from what I’ve been told, the game
was
awesome. It was a blowout win for the
Shockers over Missouri State and an epic celebration afterwards. The next goal for this team is to win this
week’s MVC tournament, something WSU has NEVER done before. If that happens they will be 34-0 heading
into the NCAA Tournament. Really? No words can really describe this. Wichita State is on television more than President
Obama at this point. It’s a wonderful
thing for everyone at Wichita State and we’re gonna ride this wave as far as it
goes!
The only
other thing I was going to mention was about the new Tonight Show host Jimmy
Fallon. I can remember growing up and
every once in a while getting to watch Johnny Carson’s monologue before falling
asleep, and while I’ve enjoyed Letterman and Leno over the years I am really
impressed by Jimmy Fallon so far. He was
the host of the Late Night Show for a few years and has been awesome to watch
in his new gig. It’s a fresh take on the
late night talk show circuit, one that I think is worth checking out. All of a sudden David Letterman looks very
old compared to Jimmy Fallon.
Website of the Week
Since the
Shockers are on ESPN every day it seems like, I thought I’d drop their website
on here this week. I’m not the biggest fan
of ESPN these days because it seems like they are more about stirring things up
with controversy but their website is second to none in my opinion. I probably visit it several times a day and
if I’m going to get anything about professional or major college sports it’s
the first place I look. I hope they
don’t change it in the future because it’s as good as it gets for sports news
and information.
Interesting articles and videos to
waste some time with
Flotrack's Run Junkie episode about the above story - hilarious (video 3:56)
Welcome to The Basketball Tournament - this is a very interesting idea
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