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!

Surviving KT Woodman, breakthroughs at OU and being a sports psychologist

It’s been a couple weeks since I checked in here.  Been a couple BUSY weeks.

KT Woodman Classic/Shocker Pre-State

Last weekend we had our big home track and field meet at Cessna Stadium.  It’s part high school, part college/university, part madness.  In all we had over 2000 athletes, 60 high schools and 40 colleges represented during the four-day event.

I was very impressed with how our staff and athletes pulled together to run off a first-class competition.  Luckily we had good weather and that always helps, but the amount of manpower it takes to make a great meet happen is huge.  Because I’m the guy who has the most communication with the other coaches from the high school and college ranks, I’m the one that gets a lot of the compliments afterwards but it’s truly a team effort.

As for our team we also had a terrific meet!  I think I counted 49 personal bests and several all-time top-10 WSU performances.

And every Saturday night when KT Woodman comes to a completion, I am very glad it’s over.

I kept track of how much I worked that week and it totaled 103 hours.  Needless to say that is why I didn’t write a blog last Sunday – I was sleeping most of it.

On to Ooooooooooklahoma

Around Tuesday I started feeling recovered from KT Woodman and we set our sights on going down to Oklahoma University for the John Jacobs Invitational.  Most of our kids hadn’t been to OU for a meet even though it’s only a couple hours from Wichita.  They have a new coach, Jim VanHootegem, who we’ve known through the years and he invited us down along with Alabama and a few other schools.

Here were the final team scores:

MEN:  Wichita St 183, Oklahoma 164, Alabama 135, Abilene Christian 107, North Texas 47, Oklahoma St 37

WOMEN:  Oklahoma 177, Wichita St 159, Alabama 125.5, Missouri St 80, Abilene Christian 62.5, Oklahoma St 55, North Texas 30

I’m not sure many of the teams cared a whole lot about the team scores, and we also didn’t enter in a way to maximize our scoring, but it’s nice to see the score and see WSU at or near the top.  We got a nice compliment from the Oklahoma coach as he told us in putting together a meet he always thinks of us as a BCS-type team in very high regard.

Our team competed well although it wasn’t probably overall as good as the KT Woodman, but I was very pleased with the sprint group.  We’ve been working hard in practice and you don’t always compete well on tired legs and most of our crew did well – there were even some major breakthroughs that are always fun to see.  Yesterday we counted eight school records this year at WSU.  Sometimes you go the entire year without one so we have some kids doing great things.

Being a sports psychologist

On the other hand with a team so big, often kids get to a plateau and struggle to stay patient for long enough see the other side.  Young people these days are so ready for everything to happen NOW and unfortunately in track, and life for that matter, it’s not how it works.  You have to grind away and keep working consistently before you see results that you want.  The hard part is you see a training partner or teammate making a big jump in performance and wonder why it’s not happening for you as well. 

As a track coach, much of your time at a meet is playing sports psychologist and trying to help kids understand they need to stay positive and enthusiastic even if it’s not their best day.

Recruiting

I haven’t spoken about recruiting much in these blogs but it’s something that is always happening.  This past week we began the final “signing period”.  We had the early signing period in November and now we are in a time where kids can sign scholarship papers from now until the end of the school year.

We didn’t have a lot of scholarship money available this year because we don’t have lots of seniors but we feel that we did very well with what we had.  So far we’ve signed about 15 athletes between the guys and girls and will probably end up around 20.  I think we have as many “impact freshmen” coming in as ever.  We know we have good teams coming back in 2016 and this recruiting class should be ready to come in and make it even better.

Since we are almost out of scholarship money our attention starts to focus on juniors in high school and the following recruiting class.  You aren’t able to call or meet officially with juniors until July 1 but you can establish email communication and begin to talk to coaches about their athletes.  I would say we’re ahead of the game as compared to previous years and will be going after more high level athletes than ever before.

It’s a great time to be part of Wichita State University and more and more young people are starting to realize it too!

Next week

It’s a little different this week as we will take part of our team to the Emporia State Midweek meet on Wednesday and then have the weekend off.  I have no idea what I will do with a weekend without a track meet.  I’ll probably go to a track meet. :)

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

Splitting up the Shockers, world records, and Shocker basketball has officially gone nuclear

Track

It was another hectic week in our small corner of the track and field world.

For a variety of reasons our team was split up into three different meets across the country.  Our distance runners flew out to Grand Valley, Michigan.  Our sprint crew went to the Iowa State Classic in Ames, Iowa, while our field event athletes took the short trip to the University of Oklahoma.

 I went with a small group of 12 athletes to Iowa State and we had mixed results.  Our women had a very good meet, highlighted by a school record in the 400m (Natalie Morerod) and posting the fastest time in the 4x400m relay in the MVC this year.  Our men had a solid meet but not the spectacular results the ladies had.

The distance runners had a similar meet in Grand Valley, some real terrific results and some that wanted to do better.  Our group that went to Oklahoma had bigger issues.  For the second time in three bus trips this year, one of our buses had a flat tire!  In 16 years of coaching I’ve never been part of a bus having a flat tire and now we’ve had 2 in our first three trips of 2014!

Friday we will split up again with a few kids going to Nebraska and the rest of the team going to Kansas State.  This is our last “regular season” weekend with the MVC Indoor Championships the following weekend at the University of Northern Iowa.

One of the things we are looking at closely right now is our conference team.  We are allowed to travel 32 men and 32 women to next week’s MVC Indoor Championships and with the depth our team always has, it makes for a tough competition for the final spots.  Usually there are about 20-25 athletes who are obvious because of their high placement on the MVC performance lists.  The remaining spots are what we end up discussing for several days leading up to when our entries are due.  Obviously, one of the main things we look at is where someone is ranked on the current lists but we also take into fact a veteran athlete who has performed well in the past and we feel confident about outperforming their current ranking.  Indoors, one of the wrenches that gets thrown into the works is the Distance Medley Relay.  On a team like ours, where roster spots for this meet are at a premium, we must field a solid DMR to score as many points as we can but we can’t kill our middle distance runners who already have to run prelims and (hopefully) finals in the 800m and Mile.  Sometimes we end up taking athletes to only run the DMR, and thus, knocking out an athlete who would go in an individual event.  It’s a tough decision to make but we look at how we can score the most points as a team – and that is the most important goal of the weekend.

The MVC race didn’t appear to clear up any more than in the previous weeks.  On the men’s side Indiana State still looks like the favorite with Wichita State and Loyola chasing them.  Our men have firepower in almost every event so it's a matter of competing well at the championship event, something we have traditionally done very well.  The women’s team battle is anyone’s guess.  I imagine Southern Illinois and Indiana State should feel like they are favorites but as many as 4 or 5 other teams could mix it up at the top of the standings.  This is the first year I’ve been at Wichita State where I’ve had no idea how our women will fare.  We’ll be analyzing it closely and trying to figure out how to scrape for every possible point.

This year the MVC is as deep and talented as I’ve ever seen.  Adding Loyola has definitely made the conference stronger but the others teams in the league have also improved significantly.  We have some great coaches in the MVC and, from a fans’ perspective, this year’s meet should be one of the best!

While we’ve been busy with all the above activities, recruiting continues on.  We will be releasing our first press release about some of our signees this week so I can’t make specific comments yet, but so far we are relatively pleased with how it's going.  I believe we’ve had 9 women commit along with 4 men.  Personally I have signed 3 athletes and am hoping to sign at least 3 more before the year ends.  With scholarship money becoming less and less every week it can make for a stressful time, especially when it coincides with the upcoming MVC Championship competition!

There were a couple of world records in track and field this weekend (Pole Vault and 2 mile) but when you’re caught up in the college track and field season you barely notice what is going on in the world level.  Congrats to Renaud Lavillenie for surpassing the legendary Surgey Bubka in the pole vault as well as Genzebe Dibaba for her 9:00.48 two mile dash.  Both are just incredible!

Movies

With being gone half of the week at Iowa State and trying to catch up on sleep and work the rest of the weekend, there was no chance for me to see any movies this week.  Most of my late night television watching has been of the Winter Olympics.  The short track speed skating is just awesome to watch!

DVD choice of the week (from my collection):  I’m gonna go with the 2008 foreign film In Bruges this week.  Starring Colin Farrell, it’s a comedy/drama about a hitman job gone wrong and how a couple of hitmen deal with it in the city of Bruges, Belgium.  I had never heard about this movie before renting it a few years ago but after one viewing it became one of my all-time favorites.  The comedy is dark, subtle and very clever and at the same time it deals with the emotional struggles a hitman could have if his job went terribly wrong.  I’ve always thought Colin Farrell was a great actor and this is one of his best.  I say check it out if you can find it!

Everything Else

Honestly there wasn’t much time for anything else this week except I need to keep mentioning the Shocker Basketball squad.  I was able to go out with some friends on Sunday and watch the game at a local sports bar, which is always a good time.  The Shockers are currently 27-0 and ranked #3 in all the polls this week.  They have four regular season games remaining and the possibility of an undefeated regular season is getting more likely with every game.  The Shockers are mentioned on ESPN every day and head coach Gregg Marshall spent an entire day at ESPN last week doing interviews in studio.  It’ll be interesting to see what effect this has on increased enrollment next year, something our school president is aggressively promoting all around campus.

I guess the other thing of note is how nice the weather in Wichita is now.  The worst part of winter is over and we are now seeing 50-60 degrees most days this week.  I like a little bit of winter but I enjoy the warmer weather much, much more!

Website of the Week

Boxofficemojo.com

This website combines two of my greatest passions – movies and numbers.  For some reason I find it fascinating to see how much money movies make and that’s exactly what this website does.  But it does much more than that, you can search how much money a movie makes in any country in the world, how much of a budget that movie had, how much money movies made with certain actors during their career, and so on.  A very cool website, and one you can spend a lot of time surfing around on.

Interesting article and videos to waste some time with

Cheat Sheet:  The Tyson Gay File 

39 test answers that are 100% wrong but totally genius at the same time 

The truth behind the original Jamaican Bobsled Team (video 8:11) 

SIU head coach Barry Hinson's post game press conference after losing to WSU - funny! (video 6:44) 

Very cool video about the fan experience at a Wichita State basketball game (video 22:31)