Friday, June 19, 2015

End of season wrap-up, new NCAA format and some thoughts on performance enhancing drugs

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!!!

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