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!!!

California recap, a problem with our sport and it's time to host KT Woodman!

We’re in the middle of one of the busiest times of the year – and I’m loving every minute of it!

California

We took 55 athletes to the West Coast this weekend to compete in three meets (Sacramento St, Stanford and San Francisco St).  The athletes I work with only competed at Sacramento St and we were able to have a successful weekend.

The meet was scored and we came up a little short in that department.  Here are the team scores:

MEN: Sacramento St 204, Wichita St 158, North Dakota St 117, Cal St-Northridge 66, Fresno St 66, Utah St 43

WOMEN: North Dakota St 139.3, Cal St-Northridge 139, Wichita St 135, Sacramento St 116.3, Utah St 77, Fresno St 66.3

As you can see there wasn’t much drama on the men’s side as Sacramento St has a very strong team and gave it to us pretty good.  This is one time where we didn’t have the availability of depth like usual (only 27 men competing) and we were very cautious with some athletes this early in the outdoor season.  But hats off to Sacramento St, they will be a tough team to beat in the Big Sky Conference.

The women’s meet was very close and we were just edged in a very exciting finish.  The Discus ended up being the final event and all three of the top teams had girls in the final.  Our girls fought hard and came up just four points short.  After the meet we talked about using it as a lesson where every point counts throughout the entire meet and the smallest of details can mean the difference in winning and being third.

I usually don’t single out individual athletes in this blog but I have to mention how fun it is to watch Nikki Larch-Miller right now.  She broke our school record in the 100m dash Saturday with a time of 11.44 that currently stands sixth in the NCAA.  Every time she toes the line she does something spectacular.  She even tried the 400m hurdles this weekend and broke 60 seconds in her debut.  With her leading the way I like our chances as we head into the MVC Championships in May.

A big problem with our sport

The Discus was the last event of the meet at Sacramento St and all of the athletes from all of the teams were gathered around watching.  Unfortunately there was hardly anyone who knew that the meet was coming down to, literally, the final throws except for a few coaches who were closely paying attention.  I don’t know how we fix this problem but it was a dramatic conclusion to a great meet that would’ve generated all kinds of spirit and cheering for the Discus throwers but no one REALLY knew what the score was.

Maybe we should make a rule where every scored meet always ends with the 4x400m relay.  That way it would be a little easier to know who the team winner is as soon as the race is over.  Obviously this would be problematic when a field event goes long and sprinters would have to wait (in this case it was over an hour) but I would be in favor of something like that.  Thoughts?

The Wichita State coaches are good friends with the Sacramento St coaches (two of the Sac St coaches used to be on our staff) and as usual we try to get together and socialize and talk about how to make our sport better.  Terry VanLaningham, who used to be the WSU jumps coach and is now coaching at Sacramento St, has put a lot of thought into making some significant changes to the sport of college track and field.  Most of the thoughts have to do with making it more of a team concept and putting a product out there that is easy to understand and fun to watch.

The longer I’m coaching, the more I get excited about team scored meets that only last a few hours against great competition.  Unfortunately not all college track and field coaches agree with me or Terry so what we end up with is a schedule full of a bunch of different kinds of meets that confuse the general public.  I think at some point, however, someone above the US Track Coaches Association (probably the NCAA) will dictate to us what a track meet, track season and track team is supposed to be – and I probably won’t have a problem with that.

Shocker Pre-State Challenge/KT Woodman Classic

After saying all that, this week we are about to host a huge carnival of a track meet that lasts four days.  I’m a hypocrite right?

One of the differences in this week is that it’s a meet that’s been going on for over 60 years and is truly a “track and field carnival” not unlike the Drake Relays, Texas Relays, etc.   It brings together great high school, college and post-collegiate athletes.  Over 2500 athletes will make their way to Wichita this week in what is one of our biggest fundraisers of the year.

Hosting a meet the size of this takes literally dozens and dozens of helpers.  We’ve been meeting with people from campus for weeks in preparation and, as long as the weather permits, we should have a great meet.

A big difference for track coaches in a situation like this is because we’re so consumed with hosting the meet it becomes difficult to do much actual coaching.  We have to do every little detail from getting the long jump pits ready to making sure we have all the officials and volunteers required to run off the meet.  I know other sports’ coaches have to do work in preparation for a game from time to time but I never see Gregg Marshall putting out chairs for players to sit on before the game haha!

Track coaches accept this as part of our job but sometimes it seems odd that when one of my athletes are running the 100m dash that I’m just as concerned with if someone is reading the wind gauge properly as I am about their performance.

Next week

If I survive I will try to recap the week that was KT Woodman.

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

How to host a huge track meet and the Shockers go to TrackTown USA

As evidenced by not writing a blog in the past two weeks, it has been a busy, busy time for Shocker Track & Field.

Track

Last week we hosted the annual KT Woodman Classic (College)/Shocker Pre-State Challenge (High School).  It’s a huge meet with 65 high schools and over 40 colleges attending.  In total we had around 2300 athletes compete at Cessna Stadium from Wednesday-Saturday, April 9-12.

Our staff and team do a ton of work hosting a meet like this. It’s one of our main fundraisers and, this year, our only home competition.  There are many pro’s and con’s to hosting track meets (especially one this large).  Some of the pro’s are: Competing at home, having access to lots of terrific recruits where we can show off our great facilities and campus, not traveling, and raising some good funds to help with our budget.  The con’s are: it’s a ton of administrative work to get ready for a meet like this, it’s a ton of physical labor, finding dozens of volunteers, not being able to coach very well because you’re constantly dealing with hosting the meet, figuring our how to feed dozens of officials and volunteers and trying to communicate with all the non-track personnel that aren’t used to hosting a large competition like this.

And everything generally goes well, unless there is bad weather.  Luckily we dodged that bullet this year.

With plenty of help, my responsibilities are mostly with the administrative and organization of the meet.  Along with our Director of Operations Chandra Andrews, we cranked out a ton of work from our office last week.  The groundwork is laid several months ago with getting all of the pertinent meet information online for the coaches to see and trying to finalize the meet schedule.  This year we made a couple of adjustments to make the meet run more smoothly.  There are also meetings with non-track staff personnel like facilities, marketing, ticket office, event coordinators, alumni hospitality, media relations, police, training room staff … the list kind of goes on forever.  Also we have frequent email blasts to the high school coaches to help them stay ready for the entry process and details of the meet so once they arrive to Wichita State we won’t have so many questions to answer.  Once everyone is made aware of their duties then the main work happens, beginning on Monday of the meet.

We have our entries due on Tuesday morning for the high schools and Wednesday afternoon for the colleges.  We push it back as far as we can so there are fewer changes during the meet.  There are lots of meets where the entries are due two weeks prior and in my experience it only causes more headaches and for the meet to be run with more empty lanes and scratches.

Monday is not too busy of a day so I actually made it home by around 7pm.  I tried to get all of my recruiting calls done by this time because I know the rest of the week will be unavailable.  Tuesday is when things really get going.  With the high school entries due at 9am, we have a staff meeting at around 8am which is mostly dealing with our next meet and trying to figure out the travel roster for the Oregon Relays (which ticketing is due that day).  After that my office doors closes and we get to work on the entries for the high school meet.  We create elite sections as well as figuring out all the heats and flights for the events.  This takes until around 2pm and then I have to head to practice.  Once practice is over around 5pm we are back in the office continuing to work on the packets until late into the evening.  I think we got done around midnight on Tuesday and the college Decathlon starts at noon the next day.

We start the meet with a Decathlon/Heptathlon on Wednesday, which is a good way to ease into things.  But most of the morning is at the track making sure everything is physically ready.  There are always little fires to put out and things to deal with so the morning flies by and before you know it the meet is underway!  Practice for our kids is largely on their own so most of our time is at the meet trying to run it off until around 3pm, when the collegiate entries are due and we have to do all the stuff we did for the high schools over again for the colleges.  Once again it’s a very late night in the office and the next day is when things really start to get busy.

On Thursday, besides the second day of the college multi-events, a few years ago we decided to host a high school pentathlon.  Since we are so good in the multi-events at Wichita State it only makes sense to be the only place to host such as event for high schoolers.  It has become a very popular event and makes it four multi-event competitions going on simultaneously at once!  We also start our high school distance carnival and Javelin competitions Thursday evening so by then the stadium is filling up and we are really underway.

Thursday night’s events end around 11pm and then it’s back to the office to do a few things to get ready for the busiest day of the week – Friday.  That is when the high school meet gets kicked into full gear, beginning at 9am and ending around 11pm when the college distance carnival finishes.  We have a large team of athletes (around 125 total) and they all work about four hour shifts at the meet. Without our athletes it would be impossible to run off a meet like this and they always do a great job of being our “officials”.  I think they usually have a lot of fun too, remembering what it was like to be in high school and compete in a big meet like this.

I always feel a lot better around Friday evening when the college distance races begin because I know the  craziness of the high school meet is over and now our athletes are getting ready to compete.

This year we were celebrating the 20th anniversary of the 1994 MVC Championship team so we had alumni come in from all around the world – even as far as South Africa!  So on Friday night after the meet I got together with a few of them and hung out until late in the evening (and yes we had just ended a 16 hour workday).

I was running on fumes Saturday morning, so luckily the only thing going on in the morning was the Hammer Throw.  With the rest of the meet beginning around noon I was able to relax a bit before the colleges arrived in full force.  After three beautiful days of weather Saturday was hot but extremely windy.  I’m not going to complain though because I’ve seen snow at the KT Woodman Classic before.  The meet ran off smoothly from that point on, we had a lot of terrific performances, and before we knew it we were hosting our alumni for a social event at the conclusion of the meet.

I laid my head down on my pillow around 3am Saturday night/Sunday morning. I didn’t move until Monday.

Normally we would have some time to ease back into the next week but this year we had a quick turnaround to get ready for the Oregon Relays.  Some athletes and coaches headed out as early as Tuesday while most of the team left Wednesday and Thursday.

Getting to see a track meet at Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon is a special treat for any track fan.  The town is officially named “Track Town, USA” and you see it all around the city.  They have hosted many national championships, Olympic Trials, Diamond League meets, and this summer will host the World Junior Championships.  They really do things right and for our kids to get to compete there is always a highlight of their careers.

Even though it was a little chilly and rainy during the meet, our kids performed well and Wichita State ended up with four victories.  I also took our kids to see "Pre's Rock" and I'm pretty sure most of them ate dinner at Track Town Pizza which was next to our hotel.  All in all it was a great experience for our team and our last long trip until the MVC Meet in 4 weeks.

The travel for this meet was a little crazy.  I know most people probably think we travel like kings in Division I but we had a couple of 3am wake-up calls as well as driving 3 hours to and from Kansas City so we could save money compared to flying out of Wichita.  On top of that Eugene, Oregon, isn’t the easiest city to fly into so on the other end we had a couple of 2 hour bus rides to and from Portland, Oregon.

Once I got back on Sunday evening I was busy hosting recruits and my world finally calmed down around 9pm on Monday evening.

Movies

Believe it or not I actually got out to a movie in the past two weeks.  I went and saw the new Kevin Costner movie Draft Day about a day in the life of a NFL general manager.  Overall I’d say I liked it.  I’m a sucker for a sports movie and this one was pretty solid.  Even though some of the material might have been a little over the top, it was an original movie and kept me entertained throughout.  I think they were trying to do a Moneyball type movie for football but it wasn’t quite as effective.  It also wasn’t as good as some of Costner’s other sports movies like Bull Durham or Tin Cup but those are hard to top!

Everything Else

There wasn’t time for anything else!!!  See you next week!

The first two weeks of the outdoor season, Budapest has a Grand Hotel, and should athletes form a union?

Track

We’re right in one of our busiest times of the year so that’s why it’s been two weeks since I’ve done a blog.  Here is the latest with Shocker Track & Field.

Last week we opened up our outdoor season with a short trip to Emporia State.  Season opening meets are always tough.  After taking several weeks off competition to focus on training, it’s difficult to get back into the flow of high quality results right away.  I like the fact that we had a more low-key outdoor opener and I thought, overall, it went pretty well.  The kids always want to run fast in meets like this and much of the post-meet conversations include being a sports psychologist and explaining how long the outdoor season is.  Our goal is to run our best during the “championship” portion of our schedule – which begins in about 6 weeks.  There are lots of “teaching moments” during these early meets.

Teams have different philosophies when it comes to how they schedule and what we wanted to do this year was to keep our team together as much as possible.  There are meets like the Texas Relays and Stanford Invitational early in the outdoor season that only parts of your team can qualify for so we made a group decision to go to Emporia and then Stephen F Austin (this past weekend) with our full teams.

This was the second year in the row we went down to Nacogdoches, Texas (Stephen F Austin).  Over the past four years we’ve developed a friendly rivalry with the Lumberjacks.  They came up to Wichita during the indoor season and we returned the favor this weekend.  In a meet with 18 teams the scoring came down to Wichita State and Stephen F Austin with their women edging us by 5 points while our men beat them by 41.  The “trophy” for winning the meet was an axe handle – definitely the first time we’ve taken an axe handle home after a meet!

It’s about a 9 hour drive to Nacogdoches and we got home around 5am Sunday morning.  Most people think that being a Division I athlete or coach is all sunshine and roses but when you get off a bus or van when the sun is coming up after two long days at a meet you don’t feel like anything special!  I actually rode with Coach Rainbolt and Coach Hetzendorf home and we took turns driving.  Traveling on long trips has never really bothered me.  I’m a night owl so I was awake when it was my turn to drive the final leg of the journey home.  These trips at Wichita State are so much longer than the ones we took at Kent State because the major schools out here are more spread out.  At Kent, a 5 hour trip was one of the longest ones we’d take.  Here that is one of our shortest!

This week we will host our only outdoor meet of the year.  Usually we host two meets but it didn’t work out that way this year, however, this week’s meet should probably count as 3 meets!  On top of hosting the annual KT Woodman Classic that has about 30 collegiate teams, we host the Shocker Pre-State Challenge – a high school meet that will bring in around 60-70 high schools and a couple thousand athletes.  Not to mention we are also hosting both a college Decathlon/Heptathlon as well as a high school Pentathlon.  The meet runs Wednesday through Saturday so today (Sunday) will be the last chance to relax for a week.

In previous years I have been mostly responsible for running the meet off and all the administrative work that goes with it.  This year we created a new position on our staff called the Director of Operations and one of our former athletes Chandra Andrews is now taking on many of those duties as part of the job.  While I’m still very involved in the hosting of the meet it’s definitely nice to have some great help when thousands of athletes and hundreds of coaches head to Wichita this week.  Last year I received and replied to over 400 emails during “KT Woodman Week”, now Chandra is dealing with most of that and I can focus more on coaching.

Even though hosting a huge meet like this is very stressful, I really do enjoy having a home meet.  Having our team run at home is always special for them and for many it’s the same facility they ran on at the state high school championships.  As of now the weather looks good – hopefully it’ll stay that way and we’ll continue down the path of improving as a team!

This weekend will be also be gathering our track and field alumni and honoring the 1994 and 2004 MVC Championship teams.  We have a strong group of alumni that stays in touch and supports our team and it’s a lot of fun to get them together and socialize during and after the meet.

Our team is much better outdoor as compared to indoor (in terms of MVC Championships) because of one event – the Javelin.  We are fortunate to be in one of the few states that have the Javelin in high school as well as having a great throws coach – John Hetzendorf.  Between his throwers and our multi-event athletes, we should dominate that event this year at the MVC meet and give us a 20+ point bump compared to indoors.  We’re also strong in the 400m hurdles and the 4x100m relay, both events we don’t contest indoor.  It’s still too early to take a look at the conference meet but we assume the teams that were in the hunt indoor will be the same outdoor, Indiana State on the men and women and Southern Illinois on the women.  SIU will be hosting the meet this year so they should have an advantage by competing at home.

Recruiting is still going well.  Many of our signees are now beginning their senior track seasons so it’s always fun to get text messages from them with their results.  We’ll also get to see a lot of them at our meet this week.  As well as keeping track of kids who are already signed, we are still recruiting hard, trying to find a few more athletes that will help fill in the holes we have heading into the 2015 track season.  The other part of recruiting right now is getting out to high school meets.  Besides finding a “diamond in the rough” senior, we are starting to focus on the juniors that we can begin recruiting fully in July.

You have to stay organized and disciplined in order to not lose your mind during this time of the year!  The days fly by and before we know it we will be heading into the summer!

Movies

It’s been a while but I finally got out to a movie in the theater and it was a good one.  I saw the movie The Grand Budapest Hotel which had a large cast of well known actors and was directed by Wes Anderson.  He directed the surprising hit Moonrise Kingdom last year so I was excited to see his latest effort.  It’s been getting great reviews and I have to say this time the reviews are correct – it’s a very interesting and funny movie that was entertaining throughout.  Ralph Fiennes was the main character and he was very good.  I’ve always liked him since I saw him in In Bruges.  The Grand Budapest Hotel has been in limited release but now is starting to appear at most theaters around the country so get out and see it!  It’s odd and original and you’ve definitely never seen a movie like it before.

I’ve seen a few other movies during the last couple weeks.  Clint Eastwood’s Trouble With the Curve was on HBO at the hotel this weekend.  It’s the opposite side of Moneyball in regards to showing the movie from the perspective of the old baseball scout who is still better than the new age computer technology.  If I had to choose, I like Moneyball way better.  Trouble With the Curve is more about the relationships of the people involved and not as much about baseball.  It’s still a quality movie though.  I watched the documentary about former Oregon runner Steve Prefontaine called Fire on the Track.  It came before Hollywood made two movies about his life.  Great documentary, I've linked it below.  I also got sucked into watching most of Weekend at Bernie’s while on the road.  One of the most ludicrous ideas for a movie ever but for some reason I couldn’t stop watching.  I guess it goes back to my childhood where these cheesy 80’s movies were always fun to watch with buddies.  One other movie I had on while working at home was Boyz n the Hood, the remarkable 1991 drama about life in South Central Los Angeles.  This movie came out while I was in high school and, being from a small rural area in Southern Ohio, I became fascinated with the story.  It’s a very powerful movie that shows a side of American that many people want to ignore.  Great movie, I couldn’t have seen a more diverse group of movies these past two weeks!

DVD Choice of the Week (from my collection):  I’m going way back for this one but let’s go with the 1959 classic Ben-Hur.  Most young people who are reading this probably haven’t heard of this movie, and at 222 minutes in length I doubt most of you will be able to sit through it.  It won 11 Academy Awards including best picture and stars Charlton Heston as Judah Ben-Hur.  He is a Jewish prince that is betrayed and sent into slavery before regaining his freedom and coming back for revenge.  The best part of the movie is an epic chariot race that lasts for at least 10 minutes towards the end of the movie.  It’s one of the best action sequences I have ever seen and for it to have been filmed over 50 years ago is amazing.  I have linked a low quality version of the chariot race down below but it doesn’t do it justice.  It’s worth seeing on a big TV if you can!

Everything Else

I’ve been so busy with work the past couple weeks I haven’t paid much attention to anything else.  I did see that Oscar Pistorious is on trial (or was).  I don’t know if this sounds bad but I don’t have much interest in what is one of the biggest stories of track and field.  I guess I prefer to pay attention to the more positive aspects of what I do and keep a tunnel vision so to speak.

We had an interesting discussion in our athletic department coaches meeting last week about athlete unions.  If you’ve seen the news lately you might be aware of the Northwestern University football players trying to form a union to help with student-athlete rights.  We have a very diverse and intelligent group of coaches in our department and it was fascinating to hear everyone’s opinions.  While student athletes forming a union might sound like a good idea it would significantly hurt them in many ways.  The only people who would come out victorious would be the lawyers.

Website of the Week

Grantland.com

The Grantland website is linked off the main page of ESPN.com and was created by Bill Simmons, who was a common contributor to ESPN over the years.  It brings together many interesting and talented writers to write about sports, movies, and pop culture – basically things guys are interested in.  In this day and age of dwindling journalism, Grantland.com is the exception.  I can usually find something everyday on the website that is of interest and if you’ve read this blog with any regularity you’ve seen many links to stories in the final section most weeks.  I say bookmark as one of your favorites and it’ll keep you entertained on a daily basis.

Interesting articles and videos to waste time with

Minor league Durham Bulls to wear R2-D2 uniform 

30 things to stop doing to yourself 

Steve Prefontaine Fire on the Track - (video 57:58) 

15 things you didn't know you iPhone could do 

2 guys playing the heavy metal song Thunderstruck on the Cello - (video 4:58) 

33 unbelievable places to visit before you die

Every counties favorite baseball team - cool things with maps! 

29 funny family photos - #4 is my personal favorite 

A new movie about a running legend - looks pretty good! - (video 3:00)