MVC Indoor Championships recap and how I (sort of) went viral last week

Well the MVC Indoor Championships came and went this past weekend.  We took home two trophies and were just a fraction away from bringing home the two biggest trophies.

The MVC Indoor Championships

If you aren’t aware by now our men won the MVC Indoor Championships by nine points and our women finish second by 10.  Both meets could have gone either way in terms of winning and losing.  Here’s a brief recap …

Women

Before the year began we thought we’d have the team to beat but an injury to our highest point scoring athlete, Nikki Larch-Miller, put that in serious doubt.  Our ladies rallied around each other and heading into the meet it looked like it would be a battle with Indiana State.  Once the heat sheets came out we realized the Sycamores had also lost a couple of great athletes and wouldn’t be the factor we’d originally thought.  Add to that our best pole vaulter was also out with an injury and all of a sudden it was a four team race that included Northern Iowa and Illinois State.

Both UNI and Illinois St had great meets the week before MVC’s so they came in hot.  Honestly we thought UNI might be the team to watch because the meet was being held at their home track but Illinois St ended up running past everyone to take the title.  In only his second year at the helm, Jeff Bovee has done a great job of getting the Redbirds to the top of the conference.  We had our chances on Sunday and with two events to go (3k and 4x4) we held a one point lead.  Unfortunately we weren’t able to outscore them at the end and had to settle for second.

Our ladies have won several titles in recent years and we were hoping to kind of “steal” this one.  Outdoors we should be a little better as we add the Javelin, 4x100m relay, Discus, 3000m Steeplechase and 400m hurdles – all events we have good athletes.  I think we will be ready in Terre Haute, Indiana, in the middle of May for the MVC Outdoor Championships.

Men

Wow!  It was a mix of up and down emotions all weekend long for our men who have finished second for seven MVC Championships in a row.

On paper, we were a solid favorite although we knew Indiana State, Southern Illinois and Northern Iowa would be threats.  Once the meet started two things happened that were eerily similar to 2015 Outdoor:  SIU started having an incredible meet and we had two events that went in the wrong direction.

Our most consistent weight thrower fouled out (ranked #2 in the MVC) and our top Pole Vaulter (also ranked #2) had an off day after competing in the Heptathlon all day.  On top of that SIU took advantage and had incredible move ups in multiple events.  At the end of the day our considerable projected lead had vanished and we were left regrouping in the hotel Saturday night.

There were no special rah-rah speeches from Coach Rainbolt, just plainly spelling out where we were and that we still had a great opportunity to win.  All season long we sensed our guys had a better focus and in the end we had a great day Sunday and held on for the victory.  A huge sigh of relief came over the coaching staff as our men started to celebrate as the 4x4 came to a close.  These guys were not going to be denied and the celebration afterwards was special indeed!  Even the ladies who had just lost their own close battle were very happy and celebrated with the guys like we had won both titles.  Aside from winning both in 2010 this was probably the most satisfying result of my 10 years at WSU.  Don’t get me wrong – we aren’t happy with losing the women’s meet but considering what we went through we were very happy with how both teams competed and rose to the occasion.

As a combined team we had projected 252 points for the weekend (men 136, women 116) and we scored 252.5 (men 141.5, women 111).  I’d say we were pretty close on that prediction.

NCAA Indoor Championships

The NCAA Indoor Championships are possibly the most difficult meet in the world to qualify for and we are lucky to have two Shockers heading to Birmingham, Alabama, in two weeks.

There are events, even in the Olympic Games, that are easier to qualify for than the NCAA Indoor Meet.  Only 16 athletes per event make it.  To put it in perspective, there are 18 guys who broke 4 minutes in the Mile this year that WON’T qualify.  Want to make it in the High Jump?  You need to jump as least 7-2.  25-4 in the Long Jump won’t get you there either.

We did have someone make the Long Jump, however.  Freshman Jared Belardo (#1 freshman in the NCAA) bombed a 25-9.5 jump Saturday to not only win his first MVC title but also move to #9 in the nation and punch his ticket for Birmingham.  Junior Breanne Borman negotiated a hard fought and emotionally draining Pentathlon to improve her previous score by 12 points and get the 16^th and final spot.

I’m lucky to have daily contact with both of these athletes and they have definitely worked hard to earn these honors.  They will be rewarded with at least Second Team All-America honors and if they finish in the top-8 they’ll get First Team.

Indoor season is almost over!

Outdoor season

For the rest of the team we will turn our focus to the upcoming outdoor season.  This week will be very light to get everyone recovered and rejuvenated (coaches and athletes) before heading to our first meet in Texas over Spring Break.

I am currently on an airplane to go recruiting for the week.  Because of goofy NCAA rules I can’t talk about where I’m going but let’s just say it isn’t Siberia!  There is a growing number of amazing coaches and athletes in the MVC each year so we gotta keep pushing forward to stay on top!

Going viral

My blog from a few weeks ago hit unexpected heights in terms of viewing and conversation.  First it got a mention in the Oregonian (a Portland newspaper) website and then got linked on the main page of the Track & Field News website affectionately listed as “Wise Guy solves college track problems”.  But then the creator of Letsrun.com, a website mainly known for its crazy message board, put it up and then all heck broke loose.

Most of my blogs get around 1000 to 1500 views per post and some of the more popular ones get upwards of 3000.  The one I did on No Selfie September ended up around 5000. My solution to solving college track and field’s problems is now over 10,000 views and climbing.  I thought it would get some discussion going amongst the coaches I’m friends with and maybe a little further but I never expected this.  Most of the credit needs to go to the goofballs on Letsrun who gave nearly 100 replies on how they liked, hated or had their own ideas on the topic.  It definitely touched a nerve with a lot of people within the sport and I’m convinced that it will lead to more serious discussion in the coming months.

I got many, many suggestions and critiques of how to do it better and in my next blog I plan on responding to most of them so keep an eye out for that.

I’ve always wanted to have a cult following.

Movies

If you’re here to listen to me talk about movies (all 8 of you), I have seen plenty lately including the Jesse Owens biopic Race.  However, I don’t want these blogs to be excruciatingly long so it will have to wait for another time.  I’ve also gone a little crazy with purchasing movies on DVD lately and I may start another blog project like last year again soon.

Next time

My response to the dozens of nameless guys on Letsrun on how to solve the problems of college track.

Until then, thank you for reading and Go Shocks!

NCAA Indoor Championships, Track on TV stinks, Let March Madness begin!

Track

This weekend was the NCAA Indoor Championships in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and we only had one athlete at the meet so I didn’t make the trip.  I’ve been to a lot of NCAA Championships over the years and if I don’t personally have an athlete there I don’t feel I should go.  I do some work with Austin Bahner, who made the meet in the Heptathlon, but we already had three coaches going.

Instead I went to Lincoln, Nebraska, to watch the Division III Championships.  My best friend, Kevin Lucas, is the head coach at Mount Union in Ohio and he had his team there competing.  I rarely get to see Kevin so the four hour drive north was no big deal.  We hung out for a couple days, did some socializing, and I got to see the meet end with Mount Union winning the 4x400m relay!  It was Kevin’s first NCAA title in that event and he was definitely fired up.

It was the first non-Division I national meet I’ve been to.  Coaching at the Division I level really distorts your perspective in terms of athletic quality and competition.  In reality, the Division I national meet is a meeting of the most athletic 18-23 year olds in the world.  It’s an amazing thing to see, and even harder to qualify for.  Most NCAA D1 champions end up turning professional after college and many of them represent their countries in the Olympic Games.

Watching the D3 meet was very cool though because these kids were in it for the love of the sport.  Now don’t get me wrong, there were some very fine athletes, but the enthusiasm and passion for track and field was on great display and I’m glad I got to watch it in person.

Thanks to ESPN3.com I was able to watch the Division I Championships on my phone.  If you weren’t able to see it you missed probably the most exciting finish in NCAA history.  On the women’s side, three teams had a chance to win the meet and it all came down to the 4x4.  Oregon outleaned Texas, winning by two hundredths of a second and grabbing the NCAA title by half a point!  Both teams also broke the NCAA record in the 4x4.  What a finish!

Speaking of watching track on TV, last week I happened to catch the SEC Indoor Championships on ESPNU, and was I disappointed in what I saw.  The SEC meet is always the most competitive conference meet in the country and I was excited to watch it, even on tape delay.  The meet was basically reduced to 90 minutes of uninteresting highlights, with very little attention paid to the field events or the drama of the team races.  Every year at our national coaches’ convention, the powers that be talk about how we need to make our sport more watchable so that it can be marketed and put on television.  The problem is when a meet is on television, the people who televise it don’t know what to do to make it interesting.

I was in Europe this summer and was lucky to watch several meets on TV while I was there.  They do a much better job and show ALL of the events, including the field events, which often have more drama than the running events.  The problem with US broadcasts of track is that they show some of the running events and only show the best jump or throw in the field events.  In my opinion a track meet should be shown like a golf match, try to show as many things as possible and let the story tell itself.  So often, in an entertaining golf tournament, the drama is built by bad shots just as much by great shots.  Track is the same way, someone who has some pull please tell ESPN and NBC this!

More and more, everything is going online so I do have hope that eventually our sport will learn how to show our sport more effectively.  I agree that we can do a better job of putting on a good show at the track meets, and the TV networks should do the same.

Movies

Once again I didn’t get out to any movies (kind of tough until the summer), but I did watch the Usain Bolt movie called The Fastest Man Alive on YouTube.  It is a 2012 documentary made about the sprinter, detailing his training, competition, and off the track life during the 2011 year.  I had heard about this movie but never felt like watching it because I feel like I’ve seen everything about him I could possibly see but once I started watching I got sucked in.  I really loved seeing the footage of him as a 14 and 15 year old, running 21 seconds and looking like a baby giraffe on the track.  I’ll link it down below, it’s an entertaining 85 minutes.  Thumbs up.

DVD Choice of the Week (from my collection):  I’m going with another Coen Brothers classic with the 2007 drama No Country for Old Men.  This movie is another reason why I love Coen Brothers’ movies so much.  They always try to do an original movie for an old concept.  In this one, Javier Bardem plays a hit man/serial killer who is chasing around Josh Brolin while Tommy Lee Jones plays a cop trying to catch them both.  It is tense from the opening scene until the end and one of the things you might notice is that there is hardly any music in the film.  I never saw it in the theater but wish I would’ve because I can imagine how intense it would have been to see it with a crowd.  It’s one of the highest rated movies on IMDB and deservedly so.

Everything Else

Shocker basketball heads into the NCAA Tournament as a #1 seed and to everyone’s surprise, they are in by far the most difficult region of the entire tourney.  Three of last year’s Final 4 are in their bracket along with teams like Kentucky, Duke, and Kansas State.  If they get past Kentucky/Kansas State in the second round they would likely rematch with last year’s national champion Louisville.  I think I saw the Chicago Bulls and the LA Clippers in the bracket as well!

As I’ve said before, the 34-0 season has been remarkable, and if they end up with a record of 35-1 it will still go down as one of the best seasons in college basketball history.  But now if they happen to run through this side of the bracket people will start talking about this being on of the best TEAMS in college basketball history.  I don’t want to get ahead of ourselves, but to even have that as a possibility for a team from Wichita State is special.  The madness starts this week!

While I was in Lincoln, Nebraska, for the D3 nationals, I went out with Kevin to socialize with the locals.  Once they found out I was a coach at Wichita State they pretty much gave me a hard time.  That’s normal when you are visiting a “major” university town.  Schools like Wichita State (or Kent State where I went to school) always get looked down upon even when their own basketball team (or any other athletic team) is far inferior.  I always laugh it off but can’t help to stand up for the little guys.  I went to a small high school and we always wanted to compete against the bigger city schools in Cincinnati, often beating them.  20 years later I am still in the same situation!

On my way home, I took a slight detour to check out the Belleville Speedway High Banks Museum in Belleville, Kansas.  The speedway is known as the “fastest half mile speedway in the world”.  I have seen this museum several times as I passed by on the highway over the years and decided to check it out.  I was given a personal tour by the 76 year old curator.  It was a fascinating look at midget car and dirt track racing at this famous speedway.  Winner’s circle pictures of guys like Jeff Gordon, AJ Foyt, and Kasey Kahne adorn the walls of this small building that is filled with memorabilia and race cars crammed into a space as big as a large family garage.  The tour guide was very friendly and mostly complained how young people don’t care about any of this stuff anymore.  I have a feeling I was the youngest visitor in quite some time.  I then went over to the track and took a walk around the famous facility.  It reminded me of growing up when I would go to Brown County Speedway with my dad every weekend.  I had so many fun times watching those dirt track races and it spurred on my first competitive love – racing.  I was very glad I stopped by Belleville and hopefully I can get up there to see a race this summer.

I was selected for jury duty today.  This was the first time I’ve ever been selected and fortunately it’s during our spring break so I didn’t have to miss practice.  I was interested in the process but all I ended up doing was sitting in the waiting room all day before being told I could go home.  I got paid $10 and mileage so I won’t be retiring anytime soon.

Website of the Week

Jayski.com

Keeping with the auto racing theme, I always enjoy checking out the Jayski website.  It was founded in 1996 by a grassroots organization to keep up with the daily news of NASCAR.  Eventually it partnered with ESPN but remained the same simple looking and informative website.  I don’t get to watch as many races as I’d like because of the track season so this is where I go for great info a few times a week.  It’s so much better than the official NASCAR website, which is too much into graphics and a bulky interface.  I hope this website continues to provide great coverage of auto racing long into the future!

Interesting articles and videos to waste time with

The epic Kansas basketball rivalry that wasn't (Wichita State/KU) 

The effects of alcohol on athletic performance 

Between Two Ferns with President Obama - hilarious (video 6:36) 

5 ways sports marketing is about to chance forever 

1994 video about "What is the Internet anyways?" - made me laugh (video 1:28) 

31 of the most exotic swimming pools in the world - crazy stuff 

Remarkable video of Jamie McDonald who ran across Canada for charity (video 9:46) 

3 part video series of Steve Nash's final days as a professional athlete (~30 minutes total) 

Usain Bolt - The Fastest Man Alive (Movie) (video 84:57)