Sorry
for the delay in writing this blog but I’ve been busy sleeping and
procrastinating.
NCAA Championships
We
took five athletes out to the NCAA Outdoor Championships in Eugene, Oregon,
last week and had mixed results. The
Division I Outdoor meet is as competitive as it gets. Case in point, last place in the men’s 100m
dash finals was 10.04.
Out
top finisher was Nikki Larch-Miller, who finished eighth in the Heptathlon and
earned First-Team All-American honors.
Our 4x100m relay team ended up 16th overall and earned
Second-Team All-American honors. I was
proud of our ladies. Running in the highly
stressful 4x100m relay on that stage and on national television can be very
intimidating and they handled themselves well.
They didn’t run their best time of the year but they did run their
second best time. Going home
All-Americans was the goal and achieving that is something they’ll never
forget.
Now
the goal will be to get back there again as soon as we can.
Here
are a couple articles prior to the meet about our kids …
What’s left in the
season?
Not
much, but there are still a few athletes finishing up their season in big
meets.
Nikki
Larch-Miller will head back to Eugene, Oregon, for the USA Championships
Heptathlon next week. She will be
amongst the top-16 heptathletes in the country (including professionals). It’ll be a great experience for Nikki as she
begins to compete at a higher level, hopefully for the rest of her career. She did terrific in fighting out an eighth
place finish at the NCAA’s so I expect she’ll compete hard again and do well
next week.
We
have two athletes heading to Oregon with Nikki for the USA Junior Championships
(held in conjunction with the USA Championships). Carlea Holt (Heptathlon, Javelin) and Dray
Carson (10k) are redshirt freshmen who qualified in their events and will get a
great experience competing at Hayward Field.
I
have two other athletes still competing as well. Deja Young (you can read the article above
about her) is currently competing at the USA Paralympics Championships in St.
Paul, Minnesota, while Nora Zajovics will be representing her home country of
Hungary this weekend in the European Team Championships.
The
track season is coming to a close!
New format of NCAA’s
A
lot has been said about the new format of the NCAA Championships so I guess I’ll
throw in my two cents.
The
“new format” that was used was the men and women were separated. The men competed Wednesday/Friday and the
women Thursday/Saturday. At our national
convention we voted to approve this format as ESPN had promised a ton of live
TV coverage. As you might guess many
traditional fans of T&F weren’t sure if this would work and many thought
the women’s meet might suffer in attendance.
Luckily
we were in TrackTown, USA, and the hometown team won both team
championships. Friday and Saturday drew
sellout crowds and the TV ratings released just a couple days ago showed record
levels of viewership for the NCAA T&F Championships. It made the meet easier to follow for the
casual fan and, as someone who was at the meet, I can say that the 2.5 hour
meet schedule was perfect to keep everyone into it and excited.
I
give the new format a thumbs up.
Performance enhancing
drugs
If
you are part of the track and field world you’ve probably heard about the
recent accusations of Alberto Salazar and some of his runners, namely American
distance stud Galen Rupp.
I’m
not here to give an opinion on that situation because I don’t have enough
information to give an intelligent thought but it got me to thinking about
something that’s frustrating.
New
York Yankees baseball player Alex Rodriguez, who is being celebrated for
getting 3000 career hits this week, served a 162 game suspension (one year, the
longest ever suspension in baseball) for admitting steroid use for several
years early in his career and during a rehab stint later in this career.
Currently
the top sprinter in the world Justin Gatlin, who is being roundly criticized because
of his past, is in his fourth year running again after serving a four YEAR
suspension for testing positive.
For
the record I am totally against anyone using performance enhancing drugs and
have no problem with them being suspended or banned from their sport. My problem is how there is no consistency
through various professional sports in what the consequences are as well as how
this is portrayed in the media (and general public).
Some
of track and field’s only media exposure comes when a top athlete tests
positive for a banned substance and gets a four year ban while a football
player gets … wait for it … wait for it … a four GAME suspension for the same
offence. Not only that, but the level of
science behind the testing in track and field far surpass anything in the more
mainstream sports like baseball, football and basketball.
The
double standard by folks reporting it in the media baffles me. I guess since they don’t know much about
track and field they feel like they can report on illegal drugs when it comes
up in our sport.
I
won’t be rooting for or against Alex Rodriguez or Justin Gatlin this year. A-Rod admitted his wrongdoings after years of
saying he was innocent while Gatlin has always maintained his innocence. I like to think the best of people and
believe in the American way of innocent until proven guilty as well as
forgiving people who admit they are wrong.
I know I’m not perfect and I’m not going to hold judgement when I don’t
really know what is going on with a certain athlete.
I
just hope that the powers that run the media become more consistent with their
reporting on the subject. Track and
Field has a lot of great athletes and coaches doing it the right way and if you’re
going to report the bad make sure to report the good as well.
What’s next?
I’m
actually not traveling for a few weeks and trying to take a little
downtime. There is plenty to do around
the office as we finish up recruiting and plan for the 2015-16 year. We should release a list of all our new signees
shortly but believe it or not we’re still trying to bring in a few more kids.
Once
July rolls around it will start a new recruiting cycle and I’ll hit the road to
meet some of the new crop from the 2016 class.
Next blog
Not
sure when the next one will be but I won’t take a whole month off from blogging
this year. I’ve had several people talk
to me about when I will talk about movies again so maybe I’ll come up with
something for that.
Until
then thanks for reading -- Go Shocks!!!
