A different kind of week, Sunflower St rivalry renewed and MVC preview

 A different kind of week

For a track coach you get used to a routine even though every week is a little different.  Practice Monday through Thursday or Friday then compete on the weekend, throw in some recruiting on random days and rest on Sunday and do it all over again for 6 months or so from January until June.

Last week was a little different as we had a meet on Wednesday and (gasp!) we had a weekend off!

Emporia State Midweek

For the last few years we’ve decided to take a weekend off and make the short trip to Emporia for a low-key Wednesday night meet, mostly for kids who didn’t go out to Sacramento earlier in the outdoor season.  Being one of the only D1 teams at the meet, many of our “developing” kids get to run to the front and gain some confidence from winning races and working on things they don’t get to do at more high profile meets.  I’ve seen some struggling kids turn around their seasons at the Emporia Midweek and end up being significant contributors a few weeks later at the MVC Championships.

What do track coaches do with an off weekend?

I will admit, the thought of an off weekend sounded really nice last week.  I’ve been hitting it hard for several weeks with tough travel and meet hosting.  So what did I do?  Mostly play golf.

In fact, not that anybody cares, but I shot a very pleasing 78 Saturday.  I won’t talk much about the 95 I shot on Sunday but all in all it was a relaxing weekend and got me rejuvenated and ready for the final weeks of the outdoor season.

Sunflower State rivalry renewed!

We are heading to Lawrence Saturday to take on the Jayhawks.  A late addition to the meet this week is Kansas State (they were going to host a meet but cancelled it and are now coming over).  Besides our Kansas rivals, we will also compete against Air Force, Oral Roberts and UMKC.  It should be a great scored meet – one that we are trying to win.

Last year we had a similar meet at K-St with KU and Air Force that we swept on both sides.  Indoor we had a Kansas Triangular where K-St won and we beat KU.

A meet like this gets our kids a little more fired up and ready to compete as we like to show we don’t take a back seat to our in-state rivals.  For anyone that lives in Kansas and likes track you should make sure to get to Lawrence Saturday for a great meet!

How does the MVC look?

With less than three weeks until the MVC Outdoor Championships at Illinois State, the race for the trophies are becoming a little clearer.  And the good news is Wichita State should be in the hunt for both titles.

On the women’s side it once again looks like a three-way battle with Indiana State and Southern Illinois.  This weekend will be a big indicator for us in terms of who will make our conference team and how ready we are.  I think we’re looking good and our ladies have a deep and powerful team that the other squads will need to be ready for.  Indiana State and Southern Illinois have great athletes and coaches too and I’m sure they’ll be ready for the challenge.  It should be fun!

For the men we also appear to be a slight favorite on paper with SIU, Indiana State and Loyola chasing us.  We have a couple injuries on the men’s side but I feel like we are coming around now and look hungry to get our first men’s title since 2010.  The MVC is a really tough league and winning championships aren’t easy.  Those teams will throw their best at us and we will need to be ready!

Next week

Hopefully I’ll be back to recap a great meet at KU as well as getting ready to host our final home meet of the year the following week, the Shocker Open.  Maybe I’ll even chat about a couple new movies I’ve seen recently as well!

Until then thanks for reading -- Go Shocks!!!

Surviving KT Woodman, breakthroughs at OU and being a sports psychologist

It’s been a couple weeks since I checked in here.  Been a couple BUSY weeks.

KT Woodman Classic/Shocker Pre-State

Last weekend we had our big home track and field meet at Cessna Stadium.  It’s part high school, part college/university, part madness.  In all we had over 2000 athletes, 60 high schools and 40 colleges represented during the four-day event.

I was very impressed with how our staff and athletes pulled together to run off a first-class competition.  Luckily we had good weather and that always helps, but the amount of manpower it takes to make a great meet happen is huge.  Because I’m the guy who has the most communication with the other coaches from the high school and college ranks, I’m the one that gets a lot of the compliments afterwards but it’s truly a team effort.

As for our team we also had a terrific meet!  I think I counted 49 personal bests and several all-time top-10 WSU performances.

And every Saturday night when KT Woodman comes to a completion, I am very glad it’s over.

I kept track of how much I worked that week and it totaled 103 hours.  Needless to say that is why I didn’t write a blog last Sunday – I was sleeping most of it.

On to Ooooooooooklahoma

Around Tuesday I started feeling recovered from KT Woodman and we set our sights on going down to Oklahoma University for the John Jacobs Invitational.  Most of our kids hadn’t been to OU for a meet even though it’s only a couple hours from Wichita.  They have a new coach, Jim VanHootegem, who we’ve known through the years and he invited us down along with Alabama and a few other schools.

Here were the final team scores:

MEN:  Wichita St 183, Oklahoma 164, Alabama 135, Abilene Christian 107, North Texas 47, Oklahoma St 37

WOMEN:  Oklahoma 177, Wichita St 159, Alabama 125.5, Missouri St 80, Abilene Christian 62.5, Oklahoma St 55, North Texas 30

I’m not sure many of the teams cared a whole lot about the team scores, and we also didn’t enter in a way to maximize our scoring, but it’s nice to see the score and see WSU at or near the top.  We got a nice compliment from the Oklahoma coach as he told us in putting together a meet he always thinks of us as a BCS-type team in very high regard.

Our team competed well although it wasn’t probably overall as good as the KT Woodman, but I was very pleased with the sprint group.  We’ve been working hard in practice and you don’t always compete well on tired legs and most of our crew did well – there were even some major breakthroughs that are always fun to see.  Yesterday we counted eight school records this year at WSU.  Sometimes you go the entire year without one so we have some kids doing great things.

Being a sports psychologist

On the other hand with a team so big, often kids get to a plateau and struggle to stay patient for long enough see the other side.  Young people these days are so ready for everything to happen NOW and unfortunately in track, and life for that matter, it’s not how it works.  You have to grind away and keep working consistently before you see results that you want.  The hard part is you see a training partner or teammate making a big jump in performance and wonder why it’s not happening for you as well. 

As a track coach, much of your time at a meet is playing sports psychologist and trying to help kids understand they need to stay positive and enthusiastic even if it’s not their best day.

Recruiting

I haven’t spoken about recruiting much in these blogs but it’s something that is always happening.  This past week we began the final “signing period”.  We had the early signing period in November and now we are in a time where kids can sign scholarship papers from now until the end of the school year.

We didn’t have a lot of scholarship money available this year because we don’t have lots of seniors but we feel that we did very well with what we had.  So far we’ve signed about 15 athletes between the guys and girls and will probably end up around 20.  I think we have as many “impact freshmen” coming in as ever.  We know we have good teams coming back in 2016 and this recruiting class should be ready to come in and make it even better.

Since we are almost out of scholarship money our attention starts to focus on juniors in high school and the following recruiting class.  You aren’t able to call or meet officially with juniors until July 1 but you can establish email communication and begin to talk to coaches about their athletes.  I would say we’re ahead of the game as compared to previous years and will be going after more high level athletes than ever before.

It’s a great time to be part of Wichita State University and more and more young people are starting to realize it too!

Next week

It’s a little different this week as we will take part of our team to the Emporia State Midweek meet on Wednesday and then have the weekend off.  I have no idea what I will do with a weekend without a track meet.  I’ll probably go to a track meet. :)

Until then thanks for reading -- Go Shocks!!!

California recap, a problem with our sport and it's time to host KT Woodman!

We’re in the middle of one of the busiest times of the year – and I’m loving every minute of it!

California

We took 55 athletes to the West Coast this weekend to compete in three meets (Sacramento St, Stanford and San Francisco St).  The athletes I work with only competed at Sacramento St and we were able to have a successful weekend.

The meet was scored and we came up a little short in that department.  Here are the team scores:

MEN: Sacramento St 204, Wichita St 158, North Dakota St 117, Cal St-Northridge 66, Fresno St 66, Utah St 43

WOMEN: North Dakota St 139.3, Cal St-Northridge 139, Wichita St 135, Sacramento St 116.3, Utah St 77, Fresno St 66.3

As you can see there wasn’t much drama on the men’s side as Sacramento St has a very strong team and gave it to us pretty good.  This is one time where we didn’t have the availability of depth like usual (only 27 men competing) and we were very cautious with some athletes this early in the outdoor season.  But hats off to Sacramento St, they will be a tough team to beat in the Big Sky Conference.

The women’s meet was very close and we were just edged in a very exciting finish.  The Discus ended up being the final event and all three of the top teams had girls in the final.  Our girls fought hard and came up just four points short.  After the meet we talked about using it as a lesson where every point counts throughout the entire meet and the smallest of details can mean the difference in winning and being third.

I usually don’t single out individual athletes in this blog but I have to mention how fun it is to watch Nikki Larch-Miller right now.  She broke our school record in the 100m dash Saturday with a time of 11.44 that currently stands sixth in the NCAA.  Every time she toes the line she does something spectacular.  She even tried the 400m hurdles this weekend and broke 60 seconds in her debut.  With her leading the way I like our chances as we head into the MVC Championships in May.

A big problem with our sport

The Discus was the last event of the meet at Sacramento St and all of the athletes from all of the teams were gathered around watching.  Unfortunately there was hardly anyone who knew that the meet was coming down to, literally, the final throws except for a few coaches who were closely paying attention.  I don’t know how we fix this problem but it was a dramatic conclusion to a great meet that would’ve generated all kinds of spirit and cheering for the Discus throwers but no one REALLY knew what the score was.

Maybe we should make a rule where every scored meet always ends with the 4x400m relay.  That way it would be a little easier to know who the team winner is as soon as the race is over.  Obviously this would be problematic when a field event goes long and sprinters would have to wait (in this case it was over an hour) but I would be in favor of something like that.  Thoughts?

The Wichita State coaches are good friends with the Sacramento St coaches (two of the Sac St coaches used to be on our staff) and as usual we try to get together and socialize and talk about how to make our sport better.  Terry VanLaningham, who used to be the WSU jumps coach and is now coaching at Sacramento St, has put a lot of thought into making some significant changes to the sport of college track and field.  Most of the thoughts have to do with making it more of a team concept and putting a product out there that is easy to understand and fun to watch.

The longer I’m coaching, the more I get excited about team scored meets that only last a few hours against great competition.  Unfortunately not all college track and field coaches agree with me or Terry so what we end up with is a schedule full of a bunch of different kinds of meets that confuse the general public.  I think at some point, however, someone above the US Track Coaches Association (probably the NCAA) will dictate to us what a track meet, track season and track team is supposed to be – and I probably won’t have a problem with that.

Shocker Pre-State Challenge/KT Woodman Classic

After saying all that, this week we are about to host a huge carnival of a track meet that lasts four days.  I’m a hypocrite right?

One of the differences in this week is that it’s a meet that’s been going on for over 60 years and is truly a “track and field carnival” not unlike the Drake Relays, Texas Relays, etc.   It brings together great high school, college and post-collegiate athletes.  Over 2500 athletes will make their way to Wichita this week in what is one of our biggest fundraisers of the year.

Hosting a meet the size of this takes literally dozens and dozens of helpers.  We’ve been meeting with people from campus for weeks in preparation and, as long as the weather permits, we should have a great meet.

A big difference for track coaches in a situation like this is because we’re so consumed with hosting the meet it becomes difficult to do much actual coaching.  We have to do every little detail from getting the long jump pits ready to making sure we have all the officials and volunteers required to run off the meet.  I know other sports’ coaches have to do work in preparation for a game from time to time but I never see Gregg Marshall putting out chairs for players to sit on before the game haha!

Track coaches accept this as part of our job but sometimes it seems odd that when one of my athletes are running the 100m dash that I’m just as concerned with if someone is reading the wind gauge properly as I am about their performance.

Next week

If I survive I will try to recap the week that was KT Woodman.

Until then thanks for reading -- Go Shocks!!!