How to host a huge track meet and the Shockers go to TrackTown USA

As evidenced by not writing a blog in the past two weeks, it has been a busy, busy time for Shocker Track & Field.

Track

Last week we hosted the annual KT Woodman Classic (College)/Shocker Pre-State Challenge (High School).  It’s a huge meet with 65 high schools and over 40 colleges attending.  In total we had around 2300 athletes compete at Cessna Stadium from Wednesday-Saturday, April 9-12.

Our staff and team do a ton of work hosting a meet like this. It’s one of our main fundraisers and, this year, our only home competition.  There are many pro’s and con’s to hosting track meets (especially one this large).  Some of the pro’s are: Competing at home, having access to lots of terrific recruits where we can show off our great facilities and campus, not traveling, and raising some good funds to help with our budget.  The con’s are: it’s a ton of administrative work to get ready for a meet like this, it’s a ton of physical labor, finding dozens of volunteers, not being able to coach very well because you’re constantly dealing with hosting the meet, figuring our how to feed dozens of officials and volunteers and trying to communicate with all the non-track personnel that aren’t used to hosting a large competition like this.

And everything generally goes well, unless there is bad weather.  Luckily we dodged that bullet this year.

With plenty of help, my responsibilities are mostly with the administrative and organization of the meet.  Along with our Director of Operations Chandra Andrews, we cranked out a ton of work from our office last week.  The groundwork is laid several months ago with getting all of the pertinent meet information online for the coaches to see and trying to finalize the meet schedule.  This year we made a couple of adjustments to make the meet run more smoothly.  There are also meetings with non-track staff personnel like facilities, marketing, ticket office, event coordinators, alumni hospitality, media relations, police, training room staff … the list kind of goes on forever.  Also we have frequent email blasts to the high school coaches to help them stay ready for the entry process and details of the meet so once they arrive to Wichita State we won’t have so many questions to answer.  Once everyone is made aware of their duties then the main work happens, beginning on Monday of the meet.

We have our entries due on Tuesday morning for the high schools and Wednesday afternoon for the colleges.  We push it back as far as we can so there are fewer changes during the meet.  There are lots of meets where the entries are due two weeks prior and in my experience it only causes more headaches and for the meet to be run with more empty lanes and scratches.

Monday is not too busy of a day so I actually made it home by around 7pm.  I tried to get all of my recruiting calls done by this time because I know the rest of the week will be unavailable.  Tuesday is when things really get going.  With the high school entries due at 9am, we have a staff meeting at around 8am which is mostly dealing with our next meet and trying to figure out the travel roster for the Oregon Relays (which ticketing is due that day).  After that my office doors closes and we get to work on the entries for the high school meet.  We create elite sections as well as figuring out all the heats and flights for the events.  This takes until around 2pm and then I have to head to practice.  Once practice is over around 5pm we are back in the office continuing to work on the packets until late into the evening.  I think we got done around midnight on Tuesday and the college Decathlon starts at noon the next day.

We start the meet with a Decathlon/Heptathlon on Wednesday, which is a good way to ease into things.  But most of the morning is at the track making sure everything is physically ready.  There are always little fires to put out and things to deal with so the morning flies by and before you know it the meet is underway!  Practice for our kids is largely on their own so most of our time is at the meet trying to run it off until around 3pm, when the collegiate entries are due and we have to do all the stuff we did for the high schools over again for the colleges.  Once again it’s a very late night in the office and the next day is when things really start to get busy.

On Thursday, besides the second day of the college multi-events, a few years ago we decided to host a high school pentathlon.  Since we are so good in the multi-events at Wichita State it only makes sense to be the only place to host such as event for high schoolers.  It has become a very popular event and makes it four multi-event competitions going on simultaneously at once!  We also start our high school distance carnival and Javelin competitions Thursday evening so by then the stadium is filling up and we are really underway.

Thursday night’s events end around 11pm and then it’s back to the office to do a few things to get ready for the busiest day of the week – Friday.  That is when the high school meet gets kicked into full gear, beginning at 9am and ending around 11pm when the college distance carnival finishes.  We have a large team of athletes (around 125 total) and they all work about four hour shifts at the meet. Without our athletes it would be impossible to run off a meet like this and they always do a great job of being our “officials”.  I think they usually have a lot of fun too, remembering what it was like to be in high school and compete in a big meet like this.

I always feel a lot better around Friday evening when the college distance races begin because I know the  craziness of the high school meet is over and now our athletes are getting ready to compete.

This year we were celebrating the 20th anniversary of the 1994 MVC Championship team so we had alumni come in from all around the world – even as far as South Africa!  So on Friday night after the meet I got together with a few of them and hung out until late in the evening (and yes we had just ended a 16 hour workday).

I was running on fumes Saturday morning, so luckily the only thing going on in the morning was the Hammer Throw.  With the rest of the meet beginning around noon I was able to relax a bit before the colleges arrived in full force.  After three beautiful days of weather Saturday was hot but extremely windy.  I’m not going to complain though because I’ve seen snow at the KT Woodman Classic before.  The meet ran off smoothly from that point on, we had a lot of terrific performances, and before we knew it we were hosting our alumni for a social event at the conclusion of the meet.

I laid my head down on my pillow around 3am Saturday night/Sunday morning. I didn’t move until Monday.

Normally we would have some time to ease back into the next week but this year we had a quick turnaround to get ready for the Oregon Relays.  Some athletes and coaches headed out as early as Tuesday while most of the team left Wednesday and Thursday.

Getting to see a track meet at Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon is a special treat for any track fan.  The town is officially named “Track Town, USA” and you see it all around the city.  They have hosted many national championships, Olympic Trials, Diamond League meets, and this summer will host the World Junior Championships.  They really do things right and for our kids to get to compete there is always a highlight of their careers.

Even though it was a little chilly and rainy during the meet, our kids performed well and Wichita State ended up with four victories.  I also took our kids to see "Pre's Rock" and I'm pretty sure most of them ate dinner at Track Town Pizza which was next to our hotel.  All in all it was a great experience for our team and our last long trip until the MVC Meet in 4 weeks.

The travel for this meet was a little crazy.  I know most people probably think we travel like kings in Division I but we had a couple of 3am wake-up calls as well as driving 3 hours to and from Kansas City so we could save money compared to flying out of Wichita.  On top of that Eugene, Oregon, isn’t the easiest city to fly into so on the other end we had a couple of 2 hour bus rides to and from Portland, Oregon.

Once I got back on Sunday evening I was busy hosting recruits and my world finally calmed down around 9pm on Monday evening.

Movies

Believe it or not I actually got out to a movie in the past two weeks.  I went and saw the new Kevin Costner movie Draft Day about a day in the life of a NFL general manager.  Overall I’d say I liked it.  I’m a sucker for a sports movie and this one was pretty solid.  Even though some of the material might have been a little over the top, it was an original movie and kept me entertained throughout.  I think they were trying to do a Moneyball type movie for football but it wasn’t quite as effective.  It also wasn’t as good as some of Costner’s other sports movies like Bull Durham or Tin Cup but those are hard to top!

Everything Else

There wasn’t time for anything else!!!  See you next week!