Outdoor season kicks off and Shocker T&F on TV!

The Outdoor season is underway!

We’ve had two outdoor meets already (4 if you count the meets, over two weekends) and I’d say we’ve been pleasantly surprised by the results.

We always have our multi-event athletes start the outdoor season with a competition in mid-March and this year we decided to have the rest of our team do the same.  We trained hard through this meet (UT-San Antonio Invitational) yet still had some terrific marks put up by the Shockers.

Same goes for this past weekend as most of our team was at the Arkansas Spring Invitational.  It was a very good meet in terms of competition for this early in the season and our kids held their own against some track and field powerhouses.

What does it mean?  You can never be sure but it can only be viewed positively that our team looks ready for the important upcoming meets in the outdoor season.  This week we’ll split up our team for three different meets:  The Texas Relays, Stanford Invitational and Emporia State Relays.  It kills me to not have our team together (see previous posts about scheduling) but with the way the current NCAA Track & Field system is set up we must make sure our top athletes get the opportunity to compete at Texas and Stanford.

Looking ahead at the outdoor schedule

After this weekend we’ll have an off week before heading into the most important portion of our regular season schedule:

April 13-16 – KT Woodman Classic at Wichita State

April 23 – John Jacobs Invitational at Oklahoma

April 30 – Rock Chalk Classic at Kansas

Then a home tune-up meet on May 6 before heading to Indiana State for the MVC Championships.  Following that will be the NCAA West Prelims at Kansas and the NCAA Finals at Oregon.

And finally, if we’re lucky, we’ll have some athletes back in Eugene for the US Olympic Trials at the beginning of July.

Lots of exciting track & field in the coming months!

Shocker T&F on TV!

In less than three weeks we’ll host one of the largest track and field meets in the Midwest – The KT Woodman Classic (for colleges) and Shocker Pre-State Challenge (for high schools).  Over 100 schools and 2,000 athletes will compete in Cessna Stadium that week.  We recently got word that for the first time we’ll be broadcasting the meet on cable television.

Several years ago (I honestly can’t remember when) I had the idea to try and broadcast our meets online and through the years we’ve carried almost all of our meets that way.  I was always surprised with how many viewers we’d have and dreamed that someday we could afford to do a more professional job.

Then in stepped WSUtv.

Before this year began I put out a message on social media for anyone who wanted to help with our online broadcasts and got a message from a guy named Curt Rierson who works on campus for WSUtv.  Curt is a serious runner and has wanted to broadcast meets for some time and as it turns out the MVC recently signed a deal with ESPN to start moving broadcasts of all our sports online to ESPN3 in the coming years.  Long story short, WSUtv is becoming an important player in helping WSU Athletics broadcast sports at a much lower cost than it would have been if the athletic department did it itself.

All thanks to track and field!  Haha.

WSUtv did our final home indoor meet (The Herm Wilson Invitational) as an online stream for a kind of “test run” and it went very well.  You can watch that meet here.

So back to the KT Woodman Classic …

Like many track fans, I am usually frustrated with how our sport gets broadcast on television in this country.  I’ve seen a lot of meets from Europe and the knowledge of how to broadcast a meet is so much higher than ours.  We’re hoping to do some things with our broadcast that no one in the USA does.  Mostly it has to do with how poorly field events are usually covered.

Besides having announcers that do a good job for running events, we plan to have dedicated announcers following all of the field events.  We’ve also created a system for live field event results that can not only be followed for fans at the meet on their phones or laptops, but it will also be able to be put on the screen to be shown during field event action.  How often do you see real time live field event standings on the screen during a competition?  Hardly ever, and if you do it might just be the top couple athletes.  We plan to do a great job with the running event results as well.

The bulk of the meet from Thursday through Saturday will be simulcast live on Cox Cable Channel 13 as well as our own LiveStream channel online.  The Decathlon and Heptathlon will just be broadcast online.

I’m excited to see how it comes off and hopefully other schools will pay attention and start to follow suit.  Having quality and entertaining broadcasts is another way we can bring more attention to Shocker Track and Field as well as helping the sport gain more fans.

Next time

I’ve been debating on starting a movie project but I’m not sure I have the energy at this time of the year – maybe after KT Woodman.  Next week (or the week after) I’ll give the mid-year outdoor update and talk about how the MVC is looking and anything else I can think of to (sort of) entertain you all for a while!

Until then, thank you for reading and Go Shocks!!!