Shocks win double MVC titles, up next NCAA Championships

I apologize for not being more consistent with the blogs but it has been a very busy (and successful) few weeks since the last one …

Shocks win double MVC titles!

If you follow our track and field program then you’re probably aware that we won both the men’s and women’s MVC Championships last weekend in Terre Haute, Indiana.  We work hard all year long to have championship meets like this but winning both is a rarity.  I’ve been at Wichita State for 10 years and we’ve won 14 MVC Track & Field titles between men and women, indoor and outdoor, but only once had we won both in the same meet (2010 indoor).  And the last time it happened at WSU outdoor was back in 2004.  We’ve been a combination of first/second too many times to count (including this year indoor) so it was a

huge relief to be able to get both last week.

Men's and Women's MVC Champions!

I am the guy who probably keeps the closest tabs on the meet from before the heat sheets come out until the 4x400m relay on Sunday.  Here is a brief day-by-day recap of how I felt about how it was going …

Wednesday

We left Wichita this morning for the loooooooooong drive to Terre Haute (600 miles).  We departed WSU at 9:30am and rolled into Sycamore country around 11pm as we stopped for two meals and a practice at Mizzou along the way.  I rode on the girls’ bus and had my fill of romantic comedies for the year (maybe lifetime).  I’m just glad we didn’t watch Magic Mike.  We’ve had some significant injuries this year so practice was light for the most part.  We got the heat sheets and I poured over them while Just Go With It amused the ladies.  On paper we were significant favorites on both sides and it appeared after the heat sheets came out we were still solidly in the lead (around 50 pts on the men and 25 on the women).

Thursday

The day before the meet starts is usually pretty low key where we go out to see the facility and do a light workout.  Unfortunately it was raining most of the day and our view of the facility was from the indoor warmup area across the parking lot.  After getting the crew through their paces we headed to the pre-meet coaches’ meeting and then had our team meeting to end the night.  We decided to show a worse-case scenario type of projection to our team where the men’s meet was closer and the women’s meet was tight between the top three teams (including Missouri St and Northern Iowa).

Friday

The first day was big for us because of our strength in the multi-events and the Javelin.  And our kids showed up ready on Day 1 by equaling or outperforming our form chart in every event.  We also had some solid qualifying results in the 200m and 1500m.  The only bad thing that happened was our leadoff leg of the 4x1 strained her hamstring in practice and now I was left trying to figure out what we would do on Sunday.  But overall it was a good day and we extended our slight projected lead out to around 15 points on each side.

Saturday

I like to call Saturday of the MVC meet “moving day” like in a golf tournament because this is where most of the prelims are and we need to move as many of our athletes into the finals as possible.  This day (which was chilly and windy) we also continued to move up the scoreboard as the conclusion of the multi-events proved very big in our title efforts.  Once again we equaled or outperformed every event on our form chart (which was a remarkable two-day achievement) and by our team meeting later that night it appeared we had a 40 point projected lead on the men and around 25 for the women.

Sunday

The final day of the MVC Championships are always exciting and go by very quickly.  My main concern was getting the baton around the track in both 4x1’s, which was the first event on the track.  We were only able to do one practice exchange with our new leadoff runner but in the race Morgan Prather and Deja Young executed a beautiful pass.  After a bit of a bobble on the second pass our ladies narrowly missed a second place finish but I was happy that we kept form on paper.  Then our men (also running a new lineup for the first time) ran very well to take third place and our day was off!  Our men had a lead that would be hard to overcome for Southern Illinois so most of my attention focused on the women’s team score where UNI was having a tremendous day.  Our projected lead of 25 had been trimmed down to around 19 when we got report the Discus went horribly wrong for us and that it would be an 11-point swing for UNI.  Fortunately those reports were incorrect and we only lost 3 (whew).  UNI had a couple of bullets left but we were able to dodge them enough that with three events remaining (200, 5k, 4x4) it was safe to say we were in the clear.  For the first time I can remember I took my scoresheet and binder and put it away while just enjoying the final hour of the meet.

It was an incredible team effort by our squad.  All 32 men we took to the meet scored points while 28 of our 32 women scored.  We ended up winning the men’s meet by 74 points and the women’s meet by 22 without the services of Nikki Larch-Miller (last year’s MVP) as well as her sister Taylor only being able to contribute on the 4x100m relay because of a hamstring injury.

It was a great celebration and our team soaked up every minute of it including dumping a cooler of water over an unsuspecting Coach Rainbolt.  Most of the coaches rode home in a van separate from the team and after a time of celebration most of our conversation started to revolve around recruiting and how we would try to win these titles again in 2017.

You can watch the replay of the MVC Championships on ESPN3.

Recruiting

There really is no rest for the weary as the week after the MVC Championships was probably our busiest in terms of recruiting and recruiting visits.  We’ve signed around 20 athletes for next fall so far but are far from done so every day there is a new potential Shocker on campus as well as getting out to the post-season high school meets.  We know we’ll have strong teams in 2017 again but we are concerned with how good we’ll be in 2018 as we will lose a lot of athletes to graduation next year.  It may sound crazy that we’re thinking that far ahead but it’s the only way you can think if you are gonna stay ahead of the pack in the always competitive Missouri Valley Conference.

NCAA Championships

We advanced 25 Shockers to the NCAA West Prelims next weekend in Lawrence, Kansas.  It’s the biggest group we’ve ever had for this meet.  The next highest total in the MVC is 15.  You have to finish in the top-12 to advance to the NCAA Finals in Eugene, Oregon, two weeks later.  We have three athletes ranked in the top-12 but around 16 in the top-30.  We’ve usually competed pretty well at this meet but it’s never a given to get someone through to the NCAA Championships.  This is college track and field at the highest level and all of the qualifiers are terrific athletes.

Next time

I’ve been so bad at keeping this blog up to date that I hope I can be back next week to report on a bunch of NCAA Finals qualifiers!  We also need to get back into some good movie discussion on here which I am hoping to do soon.  I’m thinking of taking an international vacation this summer so if anyone has any ideas let me know!

Until next time, thanks for reading and go Shockers!

A busy April and my first ever broken bone

So it’s been a while since I’ve written a blog, it has been a very busy past few weeks.

And this is a special blog.  This is the first blog I’ve ever written by voice recognition speech to text.  If you’ve ever hung around me very much you’ll know that I’ve talked about technology and the future a lot with my friends.  So they’re probably laughing knowing that I did this entire blog without typing.  And sorry from my laptop for the typo's!

The busy past few weeks

We hosted the KT Woodman Classic a couple weeks ago and, like usual, it ran off very well but was extremely tiring and time consuming.  It was the biggest KT Woodman Classic we’ve ever hosted and we were fortunate to have good weather throughout the week.  Our entire team, staff and athletic department workers came together for the event that had over 2600 athletes and 120 schools across four days in Cessna Stadium.

As a team, we competed pretty well.  We asked our kids to work the high school meet and then come back the next day and compete.  We have to do this in order to run off a high school meet on Thursday and Friday when we can’t get as many officials as we need.  Our kids worked hard and the coaches who came gave everyone high marks, the fact they keep coming back year after year and it keeps getting bigger is a sign that we’re doing things pretty well.

It was a little bit windy during the college portion of the meet, but our kids hung in there and produced a lot of personal bests and marks that put them near the top of the Missouri Valley Conference.

As I mentioned in a previous post, for the first time the KT Woodman Classic was televised on local cable television by WSUtv.  We were extremely happy with how this came off and all of the efforts put fourth by everyone involved.  We also simulcast the meet on our live stream channel and had nearly 20,000 views by the end of the week.  This nearly doubled what we’ve done in previous efforts.

The guys at WSUtv were totally professional to work with and we hope that we can work on more meets in the future.

The John Jacobs Invitational at Oklahoma

We had high hopes heading down to Norman, Oklahoma, for the John Jacobs Invitational.  We had some good practices and were optimistic that we were gonna have a good meet.  For the group that I coach, it happened be one of those meets that things seem to not go our way.  Starting with some handoffs that were less than average by the 4x100m relay, and rough races continuing throughout the first half of the meet, I was left shaking my head and wondering how bad of a coach I was.  Luckily, we started doing better about halfway through the meet and we eventually ended on a positive note.

Our throwers had a great meet and carried us to a second place finish behind the host Sooners.  I thought it was impressive showing by our team considering we didn’t compete as well as we know we could have.  It shows that when we are hitting on all cylinders we’re going hard to beat in the MVC Championships.

Missouri Valley Conference Championships preview

It has taken a while to get a good look at what the MVC has this spring.  But like we were hoping and expecting, the Shockers appear to be in the hunt for both team titles.  Our men will probably be heavy favorites to win the outdoor championship just like we did during the indoor season.  Our guys are a deep and talented team that is strong in all areas.  The most difficult thing will be picking the top 32 guys.  We’re looking at it now and it looks like there are at least 40 very deserving guys to make this conference team.  Normally being ranked in the top eight of your event helps you get onto that conference team but this year in may take being ranked even higher.  That’s a good problem to have for the coaching staff.  The Southern Illinois men appear to be the toughest challenger to our guys this year.  They competed hard indoor and gave us a good fight and we expect the same in a few weeks at Indiana State.

Our women also appear to be one of the favorites to win the championship, however, in a much different fashion than are men.  Our women aren’t as deep as our men and we don’t have as many upper level athletes.  But we have a lot of athletes that are ranked in the middle of the scoring as well as having a few events that we dominate in the conference.  Hopefully this combination can help us get enough points to win the title that we narrowly lost indoors.  It appears to be a battle with Missouri State, Southern Illinois, Northern Iowa and Illinois State (who won the indoor title).

My first broken bone in 41 years

So I recently broke a bone in my foot, I’ve been asked so many times about it I thought I would go ahead and explain what happened on here.  On the Thursday of our track meet that we hosted two weeks ago, I was in our press box.  It was dark and I went to step down onto a step that I thought was only a few inches unfortunately the step was a couple feet.  All of my weight when onto my ankle, which rolled, and after trying to walk it off and seeing how much it swelled up so quickly I realized I was in a little bit of trouble.

Luckily we were at a track meet and I was able to call our trainer Becca Fitzgerald and she came up to the press box to take a look at me.  She said it was a 50/50 chance that it was broken and she leaned towards it being broken.  She said I could go to the Dr. in the morning and get an x-ray.  Unfortunately the next day was the longest day of my entire year, the Friday of this track meet lasts about 17 hours and I’m probably the most significant person in hosting it.  So I got a bag of ice from Becca, a boot and a couple painkillers and hobbled myself around the track for 17 hours the next day, not knowing if my foot was broken or not.  I saw the team doctor Friday night after the meet and he gave the same thoughts as Becca about my foot and said I could get the x-ray on Monday morning at their clinic.  So a 13 hour day on Saturday was not as bad as Friday and I also had some crutches with me that day.  After staying pretty low key on Sunday I went and got the x-ray Monday morning and was told by our training staff that it looked like I had a broken bone near my ankle.

Fortunately it was a non-weight bearing bone so all I need to do is be in a boot and on crutches for a little while.  I’ve been getting a good workout with my arms on the crutches!  It did really suck, however, to be on crutches all day in Oklahoma trying to coach.  Maybe that’s the reason we didn’t have a very good meet, next week I will get rid of the crutches at KU.

Movie update

I had not been to many movies recently because of how busy the track season has been, however I did get out to see an interesting movie.  It was called Hardcore Henry.  It did not get promoted very heavily and has not done very well in the box office so most of you have probably not heard of it.  It is told entirely from the first person point of view, you wake up as a man in the middle of a crazy adventure and you don’t know why or how you got there.  It has very intense scenes of action and violence along with quite a bit of humor.  I thought it was a very original way to tell a story, and even though it probably could’ve been done a little better, I still enjoyed it thoroughly.  Like I’ve said in the space before, I wish more moviemakers would take chances on how they told their stories.  There are not very many movies in the theater right now that I’m interested in seeing.  Because of that I’ve mostly been watching old dvd’s at my place.

Next week

We compete at the University of Kansas against the Jayhawks, Kansas State, Oklahoma State, Minnesota, Oral Roberts, and UMKC.  Hopefully we have a terrific meet and we get some needed momentum heading in to the conference championship two weeks later.

Until then, thanks for reading and go Shockers!

MVC Championships - we win one, lose one - NCAA's up next

It was another memorable MVC Championships – both for being euphoric and devastating at the same time.

Win one, lose one

If you don’t know by now we won the women’s MVC title and finished second in the men’s meet.  Here are the scores …

WOMEN:  Wichita St 179, Indiana St 149, Southern Illinois 127, Missouri St 81, Northern Iowa 79, Bradley 61, Drake 54, Illinois St 54, Loyola 27.

MEN:  Southern Illinois 159, Wichita St 143, Northern Iowa 123, Indiana St 117, Loyola 104, Drake 80, Illinois St 76, Bradley 16.

Heading into the meet our men were picked to win and our women were picked second.  If any of this sounds familiar it’s because last year the same thing happened.  Last year I talked about the emotions of winning one meet but losing the other at the same time.  It was just as tough this year – it never gets easy.

Our ladies continue their winning ways

There is something about the MVC Outdoor Championships that our women have seemed to figure out.  We’ve won a lot of titles in women’s track and field, especially during the outdoor season.  The spirit of our ladies team seems to all come together perfectly at the MVC Championships and this year was no different.

Led by the MVC Athlete of the Meet, Nikki Larch-Miller, our ladies took a meet that looked close on paper and ended up pulling away to a substantial win.  We decided not to compete Nikki in the Heptathlon (which she is ranked #10 in the NCAA) and focus on individual events.  So she “only” did the 100m, 200m, 100m hurdles, Long Jump, Javelin and 4x100m relay.  She was ready to run the 4x400m relay if needed but fortunately the meet was over by then.  She totaled 40 points and was, without a doubt, the MVP of our team.

But like all conference championships, it was a team victory.  We had over 20 women score points and our large cheering section kept our ladies focused all weekend long.  On top of the team title our ladies also broke three school records on the final day.  It was a great meet and a satisfying end to the MVC season for our team!

Our men come close – we’ve been here before

For the seventh time in a row, our men finished second at the MVC Championships (including indoor).  If you think that sounds frustrating you should’ve been there for all seven of those meets.  This meet, in particular, was extra frustrating because we felt we had the team to win.

Here’s how it fell apart …

After almost two days of competition it looked like our men were starting to take control.  Ugis Jocis and Kyle Larkin finished 1-2 in a dramatic 3000m steeplechase race for our men to take a projected 20 point lead with the only remaining event of Day 2 being the Long Jump.  And midway through the Long Jump it looked like Southern Illinois was doing well but just a little above projected.  Then all of a sudden the skies got dark, the wind started blowing and SIU’s long jumpers started jumping out of their minds!  They moved up from the middle of the pack to go 1-3-5, mostly on their final jumps, to make a 21 point swing against the formchart in their favor.  Our projected lead heading into the final day was gone in an instant.

On Saturday night we had our usual team meeting to let the team in on how the scores looked and we all felt optimistic that we could overtake SIU on Sunday.  Unfortunately the first event on Sunday, the Pole Vault, proved to be a killer.  Just like the Long Jump the night before, SIU’s Vaulters got fired up and went 1-2-4-8 while we failed to score any points and an even meet suddenly became a 20 point deficit.

Our men hung in the rest of the day and cut into that lead little by little but we never had the big point swing that was needed to win.  It was a tough way to lose the meet.  Our men have gone through a ton of adversity this year and they were ready to win this one.

All credit goes to SIU who performed very inspired.  It was their first MVC Outdoor title since 1992.

What’s next?

We’ll give our kids a few days off to recover from the weekend and on Thursday we’ll find out who is qualified for the First Round of the NCAA Championships.  We will have at least 18 athletes qualified for sure and hopefully a few more will get in when the fields are announced.  20 is always a good number for our team.

To qualify you have to be in the top 48 of the western half of the country in your event.  It goes by declarations so athletes below the top 48 can get in if an athlete doesn’t declare for their event.  For example Nikki Larch-Miller won’t run all the events she is qualified for and so the next person gets moved up.  We could get as many as six more athletes in that way.

We’ll leave for Austin, Texas, on Tuesday next week for the meet on Thur/Fri/Sat.  The top 12 from Austin in each event will go on to the NCAA Finals two weeks later in Eugene, Oregon.  We have several athletes that have a good chance but getting through the NCAA West prelims is never easy.

Next blog

I’ll be back after our trip to Texas to let you all know how it went!

Until then thanks for reading -- Go Shocks!!!

KU and Shocker Open recap and it's MVC Championship week!

We’re one week away from the MVC Outdoor Championships!  It’s been two weeks since I wrote a blog so there is much to review! 

Sunflower State rivalry recap

Two weeks ago we went up to Lawrence, Kansas, to compete against our in-state rivals KU and Kansas State (along with Air Force, Oral Roberts and UMKC).  We won the meet on the men’s side and were defeated by KU on the women.  K-State was a late addition to the meet and didn’t enter athletes in a way to maximize their scoring potential.

We have a strong men’s team this year and that was evident in Lawrence.  In just about every event we seem to have scoring potential as well as several upper level athletes that can make a run at the NCAA Championships in a few weeks.  Our women got beat pretty handily, and while we weren’t happy about that we still like our team and our chances at the upcoming MVC Championships.

We always want to defeat our Division I in-state opponents Kansas and Kansas State, and we have done just that several times in the past couple of years.  Slowly but surely Wichita State is gaining a more significant reputation in the world of track and field and each time we take down the Jayhawks or Wildcats it adds to the public perception of how good we are and continue to be.  The people that know about track and field really appreciate what we have built in Wichita and the level of recruits we land each year show that we are here to stay.

Shocker Open recap

For the first time ever we hosted a small “tune-up” meet the week before the MVC Championships.  Usually we go to K-State or Arkansas for this meet but after going to K-State last year and being pretty much the only team with athletes there we decided we might as well host the meet this year.

And it went very well!  Competing at home is something that helps most of our kids and we saw more than the normal amount of good performances in a low-key meet like this.  I think it was the perfect way to accomplish the goal of getting in some good competition and not traveling the week before heading to Illinois.

Picking the MVC team

In previous blogs I’ve gone into detail about we go about picking our 32 man and 32 woman rosters for the MVC Championships so I won’t rehash that again but I will mention how difficult it remains for us to accomplish it without a major struggle.

If you don’t follow our team on a regular basis one thing that defines us is how deep we are.  When we show up at a meet you know you will see Shockers in every event on the track and in the field competing hard.  We have a roster of 60-70 athletes for each the men and women so getting it down to the top 32 is very tough.

Heading into yesterday’s Shocker Open, we had about 40 athletes we were considering for those 32 spots and some of the athletes towards the bottom of the list had great days and put themselves into positions that made us rethink where they stood.  That’s exactly what we wanted to happen.  We want it to be as tough as possible to make this team because we know that the 32 athletes that will head to Illinois State next week will be ready to contribute to our goal of winning the Valley title.

Our coaching staff has a group text that we constantly use to message each other about various things in our program.  Today I woke up to several messages including ones from Coach Rainbolt from 3am where he was up all night analyzing our team and how the MVC stacks up.  Coach Bolt is passionate about our teams winning the title and waking up to a stream of messages between our coaches for something like that is very cool indeed.  Being a track coach isn’t a normal occupation and we are very fortunate to be able to get paid to do what we do.  While some people might think pouring through meet results to determine how to pick our team seems tedious, I tend to think it’s awesome.  I have no problem spending my “off” days doing just that.

With that being said, we have not made our final decisions yet and will probably go through the rest of the weekend discussing the final spots.  We know how close these meets can be and picking the right person who might score one extra point can be the difference in winning or losing a championship next Sunday.

How does the MVC look?

 

Once again the MVC looks like a dogfight between several teams and it appears we will be in the hunt on both sides.  Our men probably have a slightly better shot at winning than our women but we could easily win or lose either championship.

On the men’s side the closest competitor on paper looks to be Southern Illinois but we know that Indiana State has won a lot of titles and will have to be dealt with.  Loyola also has a strong senior laden team and will do some serious damage in several events.  I imagine those three teams along with Wichita State will distance themselves from the field and battle it out on Sunday for the title.  As I mentioned earlier our men are deep and talented across the board and scoring in all 21 events is very possible.  If we’re able to do that I like our chances of winning the title.  The last time the MVC Championship was at Illinois State in 2010 our men set an all-time MVC scoring record of 224 points in winning the title.  Let’s hope history is about to repeat itself!

The women’s meet looks like a three-way battle with our old rivals Indiana State and Southern Illinois.  Just like during the indoor season when we finished third and just a few points from winning the title, this meet appears to be coming down to the final events for all three teams.  Indiana State has made a late season surge to really look tough while Southern Illinois has been consistent all outdoor season.  We will be coming to the meet with some heavy hitters in a few events and for us to win the title our top girls will need to be ready to perform as well as the bottom half of our roster needing to pick up some “move-up” points for us to come out on top.

It should be an exciting three days of competition!  Make sure to follow along on Goshockers.com as well as our social media pages to keep up to date on this fun and entertaining meet!

Recruiting

While the outward appearance of focus would seem to be on our current team, our recruiting efforts to build our future team have been intense as well.  We’ve signed several good athletes in recent weeks and will continue as the spring winds down.  In fact we have four recruits coming in this week before we head off Wednesday to the MVC meet.

Once the season ends in July I’m planning on doing some blogs devoted solely to recruiting but for now just know our staff is getting after it and beating the bushes to continue to have the best team representing Wichita State we can.

Movie update

It’s been so busy that I haven’t had the chance to do much movie watching but I did see a movie that I want to recommend everyone to check out.  It’s called Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father.  It’s a documentary made by a guy whose friend was murdered and this movie is to tell his infant son about his dad.  That is all I want to reveal about this movie and I encourage you to find it and watch it without trying to read anything more about it.  I promise that by the end of the movie you will be glad you did.  Most movies don’t have much of a profound effect on me afterwards but this one did.  Check it out!

Next week

Well I’m sure a recap of the MVC Championships will dominate this area next week as well as looking forward to the first round of the NCAA Championships two weeks later in Austin, Texas.

Until then thanks for reading -- Go Shocks!!!

A different kind of week, Sunflower St rivalry renewed and MVC preview

 A different kind of week

For a track coach you get used to a routine even though every week is a little different.  Practice Monday through Thursday or Friday then compete on the weekend, throw in some recruiting on random days and rest on Sunday and do it all over again for 6 months or so from January until June.

Last week was a little different as we had a meet on Wednesday and (gasp!) we had a weekend off!

Emporia State Midweek

For the last few years we’ve decided to take a weekend off and make the short trip to Emporia for a low-key Wednesday night meet, mostly for kids who didn’t go out to Sacramento earlier in the outdoor season.  Being one of the only D1 teams at the meet, many of our “developing” kids get to run to the front and gain some confidence from winning races and working on things they don’t get to do at more high profile meets.  I’ve seen some struggling kids turn around their seasons at the Emporia Midweek and end up being significant contributors a few weeks later at the MVC Championships.

What do track coaches do with an off weekend?

I will admit, the thought of an off weekend sounded really nice last week.  I’ve been hitting it hard for several weeks with tough travel and meet hosting.  So what did I do?  Mostly play golf.

In fact, not that anybody cares, but I shot a very pleasing 78 Saturday.  I won’t talk much about the 95 I shot on Sunday but all in all it was a relaxing weekend and got me rejuvenated and ready for the final weeks of the outdoor season.

Sunflower State rivalry renewed!

We are heading to Lawrence Saturday to take on the Jayhawks.  A late addition to the meet this week is Kansas State (they were going to host a meet but cancelled it and are now coming over).  Besides our Kansas rivals, we will also compete against Air Force, Oral Roberts and UMKC.  It should be a great scored meet – one that we are trying to win.

Last year we had a similar meet at K-St with KU and Air Force that we swept on both sides.  Indoor we had a Kansas Triangular where K-St won and we beat KU.

A meet like this gets our kids a little more fired up and ready to compete as we like to show we don’t take a back seat to our in-state rivals.  For anyone that lives in Kansas and likes track you should make sure to get to Lawrence Saturday for a great meet!

How does the MVC look?

With less than three weeks until the MVC Outdoor Championships at Illinois State, the race for the trophies are becoming a little clearer.  And the good news is Wichita State should be in the hunt for both titles.

On the women’s side it once again looks like a three-way battle with Indiana State and Southern Illinois.  This weekend will be a big indicator for us in terms of who will make our conference team and how ready we are.  I think we’re looking good and our ladies have a deep and powerful team that the other squads will need to be ready for.  Indiana State and Southern Illinois have great athletes and coaches too and I’m sure they’ll be ready for the challenge.  It should be fun!

For the men we also appear to be a slight favorite on paper with SIU, Indiana State and Loyola chasing us.  We have a couple injuries on the men’s side but I feel like we are coming around now and look hungry to get our first men’s title since 2010.  The MVC is a really tough league and winning championships aren’t easy.  Those teams will throw their best at us and we will need to be ready!

Next week

Hopefully I’ll be back to recap a great meet at KU as well as getting ready to host our final home meet of the year the following week, the Shocker Open.  Maybe I’ll even chat about a couple new movies I’ve seen recently as well!

Until then thanks for reading -- Go Shocks!!!

MVC Championships: we win a title, we lose a title - how are we supposed to feel?

Well it was a wild weekend of track and field in Carbondale, Illinois, where the Shockers were able to win the women’s title and place second in the men’s meet by 11.5 points.

If this blog is a good news, bad news kind of thing I’ll start with the bad (although it wasn’t all that bad).

MEN

We were picked to win the men’s meet but we knew it would be tough because of several injuries we had during the season.  The most significant loss we had during the outdoor season was freshman multi-eventer Hunter Veith, who had scored over 7000 points in his first ever Decathlon and would probably be able to score in a couple more events during the weekend.  On top of that we had lost about 8 other athletes to injury during the indoor or outdoor seasons that would’ve been contributors.

Even with all that we still had a team that could’ve won and prior to the meet we had us as a 12 point favorite on paper.  One of the problems with that projection was that we didn’t have a whole lot of move up points left available for our top athletes – they were already ranked first or very high in the conference standings.  That made our lead on paper have a very thin margin for error – especially with a team as good as Indiana State behind us in second.

We had a very tough time picking our 32 guys, even tougher than I detailed during the indoor season.  Two weeks before the championship we still had about 45 guys in the running for those 32 spots and after our final meet we had 37 guys that we all wanted to make the team.  How do you pick 32 guys when you need all 37?  At that point we made our best guesses about how the entries would look and who would perform the best.  In hindsight we made good decisions and the fact that 29 of our 32 guys scored points individually proved that fact.

We started the meet very well and everything looked good early.  We ended up scoring 153 points where we had projected 158 so the guys really did do a great job.  Indiana State just had a great meet (especially on Saturday) and outperformed their form chart by 18 points.  We could point at a couple events where we had let downs but that’s the way all championship meets go.  It was a hard fought meet that came down to the last events and our guys battled hard.  Hopefully we learned some lessons and next year will be even hungrier to try and figure out a way to beat those guys from Terre Haute.

WOMEN

The women’s meet was the opposite of the men’s as we were picked second behind Indiana State heading into the meet.  We have won a lot of women’s championships in recent years and our ladies just seem to know how to compete and win titles when it counts.  We had Indiana State as a significant favorite heading into the meet – 36 points – and we knew we needed to get off to a quick start.

That’s exactly what happened as we cut the projected lead in half on day one before holding form on day two.  We figured them as a 16 point favorite heading into Sunday and needed some good things to happen.  Right away good things happened.  We got a four point swing in the triple jump and our 4x100m relay team took second place while Indiana State didn’t finish.  From that point we continued to build our lead until clinching the title with a few events left.

28 of our 32 girls scored in this meet which is the deepest team we’ve ever had.  Add into the fact that we return over 90% of our points and we feel really good about where our women’s team is heading into next year.

OVERALL

One of the strangest feelings you can ever have is winning a championship and losing a close battle in the same day at virtually the same time.  I try to explain the feeling to people like this – Imagine your team just won the World Series in Game 7 on a dramatic finish, now imagine you also coach the other team that just lost.  How are you supposed to feel?

We were so happy to win that women’s championship but so frustrated in losing the men.  I’m sure Indiana State felt the same way.  In my 8 years at Wichita State we’ve won both men’s and women’s titles but only once (2010 indoor) have we won both at the same time.  That was an incredible feeling and what we work for every day to try and duplicate.

It’s great having a rivalry with a team like Indiana State who is, obviously, working just as hard at it as we are.  I’m sure they are back home this week trying to figure out how to win both titles next year as well.  We have a great conference and winning a championship is definitely earned!

LOOKING AHEAD

No we are on to the NCAA West Preliminaries in Arkansas next week.  We have at least 15 Shockers qualified at the moment and hopefully will get a few more in that are on the bubble Thursday.

The season has just flown by and now we are almost done!  Coming up we have the NCAA Prelims, NCAA Championship Finals, USATF Championships, and USA Junior Championships before taking a break around July.  It’s been a great year and hopefully we will have our elite athletes earn a few all-American awards in the next few weeks.  Go Shocks!

MVC Outdoor Championship Week!

This is going to be a short blog because it’s the extremely busy week called MVC Outdoor Championship Week!

Our team heads to Southern Illinois on Wednesday and we will compete Friday/Saturday/Sunday.  I believe our men will be a narrow favorite over Indiana State while our women will probably be second on paper behind the Sycamores.

We had an incredible battle to make our 32 man and 32 woman rosters.  I’m going to try and detail a little more of that next week.  As for now we are preparing our 64 Shockers for the final conference championship of the season.  After that we will begin the NCAA Championships.

To keep up to date with the MVC Championships, follow along at the official MVC Championships Central Page, our WSU Twitteraccount, or our Facebook page.  Go Shockers!