MVC Indoor Championships Week and reactions to my ideas to change college track

It’s MVC Week!

If you came here to read my blog about how I would fix college track and field go HERE. Some of my comments on the reaction to it is down below the MVC stuff.

And now onto …

The MVC Indoor Championships

This is the biggest week of the indoor season in terms of our team goals and we are very excited to be heading to the University of Northern Iowa for this weekend’s MVC Indoor Meet.

And it looks like it will be a real barn burner.  For those of you who won’t be there in person you can catch it on ESPN3 Saturday and Sunday.

Women

All year long it has looked like it will come down to a close meet between Wichita State and Indiana State and I still think those are the two teams that it will eventually come down to.  However, there are some other teams starting to creep into the picture.

I sat down and took my best guess at the scores and this is what I came up with:

Indiana St 120, Wichita St 115, Northern Iowa 94, Illinois St 87, Southern Illinois 67, Drake 57, Missouri St 55, Bradley 47, Loyola 21.

On paper, according to this it looks like a dead heat (5 points is nothing on paper), but UNI and Illinois St has taken advantage of the more evenly matched nature of the MVC this year and could sneak in there if us or Indiana St slip up.

There are injury question marks for several of the top teams so we are going to go into the meet as underdogs in our mind.  We have a very balanced team that can score in just about every event and it will take a total team effort to win this weekend.  Our ladies are usually very tough at the MVC meets and I think we will give a great effort!

Men

Our men have been snake bit at the MVC Championships.  We’ve been second for SEVEN MVC meets in a row!  So here’s how it looks on paper for this one …

Wichita St 134, Indiana St 109, Northern Iowa 107, Illinois St 95, Southern Illinois 95, Bradley 55, Loyola 37, Drake 31.

So it looks like we have the advantage right?  Well yes and no.

We are definitely excited to be the favorite and we have a great all-around team.  We appear to be as healthy as we’ve been all season and I think our guys are ready to go and win this championship.

On the other hand there are four other quality teams that are sitting there and waiting for us to falter.  The MVC is a very good league – just take a look at the latest TFRRS lists and you’ll see quality athletes in all of the events so we need to be focused on doing what we’ve been doing all season long.

I am glad we are the favorite on paper but we are not going to take that for granted – especially after being second the last seven times.  Our guys are hungry and determined to bring home the big trophy Sunday!

Reaction to my blog from last week

If you didn’t read my blog last week and you’re curious go check it out.  It’s the second most read blog I’ve ever had behind No Selfie September, haha!

Surprisingly the reaction to it has been almost 100% positive.  Actually there have been three categories of reaction:

The first are people (about 60%) who overwhelmingly think my idea is a good one.  They are frustrated with track and think I am onto something good.  I’ve even had a couple of T&F’s top national journalists thank me and tell me the same.

The second group of people (about 20%) liked the concept of it but didn’t understand all of the details.  I think I need to go back and get a little more specific for that group of people (coaches).

The final group (about 20%) were distance coaches.

It was funny to see the reaction from distance coaches.  I even made a point to call a few of them to see if I could get them to argue with me but to no avail.  Either they didn’t take it seriously or they have respect for my opinion (right! Haha).  Most of them actually liked parts of it but never thought it would have much of a chance to go anywhere.  We’ll see.  I’m glad I put it out there.  Hopefully more to come at a later date.

Next time

I will recap the MVC Indoor Championships for everyone and hopefully it’s a good one!  The meet concludes on Sunday so it may be a couple weeks until I post again.

Until then, thank you for reading and Go Shocks!