The Kansas track rivalry heats up this week, a look at the MVC race, and it's windy in Wichita!

Track

We just had an odd weekend in the world of outdoor track and field – an off weekend.  Well sort of.

As we put our schedule together this year we knew the week following the Oregon Relays (which were right after the KT Woodman) would probably be a time our athletes would be tired so we decided to have an off weekend to give our kids a chance to rest and recover as we prepare for the final regular season meets of the year.

We did have a meet, however, as we took some of the athletes who didn’t go to Oregon up to Emporia State on Wednesday night for the ESU Midweek Open.  We got some nice, warm weather and those who competed did a great job putting up several personal records.  Not making the trip to Oregon was tough to take for many of those athletes but they responded beautifully with terrific results at Emporia.

I decided to give the group Thursday off from practice and we had a spirited final day of the week for Friday’s practice.  Now that the weekend is behind us, the team looks refreshed and ready for our meet at Kansas State Saturday.  We have a great meet planned this weekend as we’ll compete against Kansas State, Kansas, and the Air Force Academy in a scored competition.  The weather forecast looks good and we should be ready to put up some big results.

 

We’ve always wanted to have scored meets against our in-state Division I rivals but haven’t been able to do so until this year.  I am happy to announce that beginning next year we will start our indoor season with a scored triangular meet with Kansas-Kansas State-Wichita State.  The meet will rotate between the three schools for 2015, 2016, and 2017.  It will be a great way to showcase track and field in Kansas and another chance for us to compete against these Big 12 schools, including the defending national champion Jayhawks.

I haven’t mentioned much about the MVC race in the previous weeks but it is starting to become a little clearer now.  Just like always, the MVC Outdoor Championships should be a close battle between several teams.  I always score the meet straight off the performance lists every week to see how we stack up and at the moment the lists say we have a slight lead on the men’s side and are in second place on the women’s.  With the exception of the 10k, most athletes have competed in their main events so this gives us a pretty good look at where we stand.  Here is what the “off the list” scores are:

Men: Wichita St 149, Indiana St 135, Loyola 127, Northern Iowa 112, Southern Illinois 109, Illinois St 91, Drake 73, Bradley 19.

Women:  Indiana St 159, Wichita State 128, Missouri St 105, Southern Illinois 104, Loyola 90, Northern Iowa 87, Illinois St 67, Bradley 41, Drake 37.

As you can see we have a very balanced league and I would say any of the top five men’s teams should be considered for the title as well as the top four women’s teams.  If you remember the indoor championship our women significantly outperformed our projection and came from about 60 points down to lose by 13.  We’re gonna need another performance like that to defeat Indiana State while our men look to be on more equal footing with the Sycamores.  They are the defending champions and we know they will be ready to go.  We’ve been working hard though and our teams are hungry for a title!  It should be a great weekend of track and field in Carbondale, Illinois, in three weeks!

The one thing that has been a big disadvantage for us is that most of our meets have been so windy.  The NCAA and our conference doesn’t allow times when the wind is over 4.0 meters per second and in some cases we have athletes who haven’t had a single race under that standard.  I think we have some very good kids that should factor significantly when we’re all on the same track together and hopefully this will give us the boost we need.  The wind also significantly hinders the races around the track.  The weather this Saturday looks good so hopefully we get some legal times to put on the board.

With having an off weekend from competition I got busy in recruiting by getting out to a couple local high school meets.  There are always meets going on in the Wichita area and most Tuesday and Friday nights can be spent scouting out the local talent.  Most of our recruiting for the class of 2014 has been completed so much of the work is in seeing the class of 2015 kids for the first time.  And while “most” of the 2014 class of recruiting is done, it’s not totally done so being at a meet when a new senior pops up is always a good thing.

For the time being, I’m only going to be writing about track and field because, well, that’s about all that I have going on at this time of the year.  I’ll try to add in some new movie stuff when I actually start watching them again!  Go Shocks!