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!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment