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!

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!!!