How we pick our MVC team, Short films are amazing, Sports Illustrated loves the Shockers, and they ride bulls in Wichita bars

Track

At this time next week we will have just finished the MVC Indoor Championships so, obviously, we have been very busy in preparation for trying to have our team ready for next weekend.

Several athletes took this past weekend off, while most of the others competed at Kansas State or Nebraska on Friday.  We split up our team to give each individual their best chance for success.  Nebraska’s banked track benefits the runners going around the track while Kansas State’s field event and straightaway sprints are generally better.

Besides giving some athletes a final “tune-up” for the MVC Championships, these meets also provide a last chance for several athletes to try and make our 32 person roster for next weekend.  It’s very competitive to make and being a part of a conference championship roster is the first goal for most athletes we have.  If you can make our 32 person roster, we feel you have a chance to score points at the MVC Championships.  It makes for some very difficult decisions and as I write this blog (late Sunday night) we still haven’t 100% figured it out.  Some teams don’t have this issue because they don’t have 32 quality athletes to take to this meet.  We are always one of the deepest teams in the conference so it makes for a good problem to have.

Here’s how we go about picking our team.  Let’s take our men’s team for example.  First of all, the goal of picking a team is to score the most points possible.  This might seem obvious but what you have to take into account are things like relays (which score automatic points) or events that are weak.  Last year we had an excellent hammer thrower named Taylor Goldsmith, who was on the bubble of making the NCAA West Preliminaries but didn’t make our conference team because of how strong the MVC was in the Hammer.  So the first thing to look at it is who are the “no-brainers”, people who are ranked high in the MVC in their event and are most likely to score.  On our men’s team we have 18 athletes who we consider automatic to make the team (with one of them slightly injured, I’ll address that in a moment).  Then we look at who are at the next level, basically athletes ranked 9-20 in the conference, and we have about 17 athletes in that range.  After that we include the rest of the team who is still competing but not likely to make it (about 10).  So overall there are around 45 men competing for the 32 spots and most likely 17 men competing for the last 14 spots.  After our meet 2 weeks ago at Oklahoma one of the men from the bottom group moved up to make it 18 for 14 spots.

We take that middle group and see who is the most valuable.  Who can run the Distance Medley or 4x400?  Who has scored in the past but maybe hasn’t had a great indoor season?  Who is competing in a weaker event or in an event that we don’t have many entries?  Once we analyzed all that last week, we took 7 from the middle group onto the roster so now we have 25 athletes with 11 competing for the final 7 spots.  From there we headed to Nebraska and Kansas State to see who might impress us and make the team.  Lastly, we have one athlete, who would be a no-brainer, that has a slight hamstring issue.  We probably won’t know until practice on Monday or Tuesday if he will be ok so we need to figure out who our first alternate would be just in case.

On the ride home after the meet we had all the info we needed to start making the tough decisions on the final roster spots.  Different coaches give their perspective on who they think should go and in the end Coach Rainbolt has the final say.  This year we had a couple of very tough decisions.  One of the reasons it was so tough was because we need to field a Distance Medley Relay team but we don’t want to bang up all our best distance runners who will be running several individual races.  Do we double (or triple) one of our top guys or take someone else to only run the relay and be fresh?  If we take someone only for the relay it will knock out somebody in an individual event.  At this point you have to start going on hunches and comparing different levels of risk because no one knows for sure what the best decision will be until the meet comes and goes.

As of this writing we have our 32 women figured out and 30 of our men.  Those final two spots will be decided in the morning with the coaching staff.  Once that is done we will post the list at practice and start figuring out what events everyone will be entered in for the MVC Championships.  That’s a whole other process of analyzing the conference and how to maximize our point scoring potential.

I’m sure it sounds like a lot of work and stress figuring out these roster spots but it’s one of the things I enjoy the most about my job.  Putting together a team to try and win a championship is very hard but after a successful championship it’s one of the most rewarding feelings you can have as a coach!  Most people think that track coaches only figure out workouts and coach the technical aspects of track and field but in reality it is only a small part of what we do and think about on a daily basis.

As for the MVC Championship itself, and how we look, if I had to predict where the pre-meet coaches’ poll will put us I would say our men are second and our women third or fourth.  Not much changed this weekend so you can read last week’s blog for who I think are the favorites.  Coming home from Northern Iowa with a trophy (top-2 finish) will be the goal for both squads but our women face a significantly steeper climb than our men in accomplishing that goal (although both teams are focused on winning the championship, not finishing second).

The indoor and outdoor conference championships are my favorite meets of the season, it’s the one time the entire team is totally focused on what the whole team is doing.  It creates great synergy and makes the atmosphere at the meet electric.  It’s unfortunate that most people can’t experience the team atmosphere created at these kind of meets.  If anyone has ever been at a MVC Championship meet they will probably tell you how enthusiastic Wichita State is, both the team and the fans.  Hopefully several of you can make the trip to Cedar Falls, Iowa, next weekend and cheer us on to victory!

In terms of practice, this week is all about fine tuning the athletes and getting them feeling confident about the upcoming races.  Some people call it “peaking” but we refer to it as “maintained readiness” throughout the year.  This week we want to be more ready than ever.  Our practices will be intense but short with lots of rest.  The bus will leave Thursday morning and we compete Saturday and Sunday.  Follow our Twitter page for all kinds of updates throughout the weekend @WichitaSt_TFXC.

Tomorrow (Monday) we will have a press release talking about our signees so far this year so I will try to take some time next week to talk about that, although I have a feeling I will talk a lot more about the MVC meet (hopefully good stuff!).  We are very excited about the athletes we’ve signed so far so check out Goshockers.com to see all the stats on the new recruits!

Movies

Even though this week was pretty busy I enjoyed some really good movie watching.  The highlight of my week was Saturday morning when I got to see all the Academy Award nominated short films in the live action category.  This is an annual event on the west side Warren Theater in Wichita.  Six movies, ranging from 7-30 minutes for FREE!  There are three categories of short film awards:  live action, animated, and documentary.  I wanted to see all three but got there too late, I guess word gets out when free movies are being shown.  But even though I only saw the live action category, it was still awesome.  In all it was just under two hours of movie watching, easily the best two hours I’ve seen all year.  When you strip away the Hollywood stereotypes of how movies are “supposed” to be made, it is really beautiful to see what talented filmmakers can do.  If you have any way of seeing these movies, go and do it.  Ask your local movie theater to bring these to your area!  I’m really lucky to live in Wichita, there is a very vibrant art culture in this city as well as a popular film festival every October called the Tallgrass Film Festival.

I also saw a couple of great movies at home via YouTube.  The first one is called Comedian (2002), a documentary chronicling Jerry Seinfeld’s post “Seinfeld” days when he was starting over with his stand-up comedy act.  I had seen this movie about 10 years ago but it was great seeing it again.  I’ve always been a fan of stand-up comedy and seeing how these super talented comedians come up with their act is impressive.  And I’m a big Seinfeld fan anyways.  Besides being hilarious, I’ve always like how he carries himself, always upbeat and full of optimism.

The other movie I saw was Stephen Speilberg’s first full-length movie he directed called Duel (1971).  I had heard about this movie but had never seen it and sure enough the whole thing was there on YouTube for free.  I wasn’t sure I’d watch the whole thing but pretty quickly it got me hooked.  It was about a normal guy driving through the mountains on a highway and basically trying to prevent getting murdered by a lunatic in a semi truck.  Sounds crazy but it is one of the most dramatic movies I’ve ever seen.  I don’t want to spoil any of the plot points but if you haven’t seen it check it out.  I really enjoyed this movie, so much in fact that I’ll probably try to buy it on DVD this week.  I put links to both these movies below in the final section of this blog.

DVD choice of the week (from my collection):  Considering we are the underdog and

heading into a tough battle this week I’m gonna pick Rocky Balboa (2006).  This is the final movie in the Rocky films, where Balboa comes out of retirement to fight an exhibition against the current champion.  While not as commercially successful as some of the previous films, I have always enjoyed this particular movie.  The boxing is probably the most realistic of all the Rocky movies and the climax of winning or losing isn’t the most important part of the picture.  Maybe I’ll take this on the trip for the Shockers to watch on the bus.  They’d probably rather watch Fast and Furious though, haha.

Everything Else

What can I say about Shocker Basketball?  They are now the only unbeaten team in the country and will probably be ranked #1 or #2 in this week’s national polls.  They are on the cover of this week’s Sports Illustrated.  They have two more games left, away at Bradley and home against Missouri State to try and go 31-0 for the regular season.  I can’t express how impressed I am with these guys.  By being a coach in the athletic department I am fortunate to be able to have two season tickets for all the games.  I go to a few games but usually I give them away to friends (NCAA rules prohibit us from selling our tickets for profit).  In past years, every once in a while I’d get asked for my tickets, but now every game I get at least a dozen people ask me.  I got offered $200 a piece for the last game of the year against Missouri State (which I’ll be gone for the MVC Championships).  On the website Stubhub.com tickets are selling for anywhere from $150-$500 a piece for that game!  I guess everyone wants to be a part of history.  I’m very happy to be coaching here at this special time for the athletic department.  Go Shocks!

This was the first Saturday I’ve had free for a long time so I took advantage and did some socializing with one of my former athletes, Dylan Hartnett.  He was a MVC champion in the 200m and 400m dashes a few years ago and one of the few single friends I still have left! We had lots of fun and hung out with several cool people at a place called Club Rodeo.  It’s a country bar that has live bull riding.  Let me repeat, live bull riding.  Not mechanical bull riding, but professional (kind of) bull riders who are in a competition every Friday and Saturday night.  Most of the night people are dancing then for 15 minutes or so every hour there is live bull riding.  Anytime I have a friend from out of town I take them to Club Rodeo and they are amazed at what is transpiring.  Never a dull moment out here in the Heartland!

Website of the Week

DailyRelay.com

This is a great website that has daily articles about all levels of track and field.  I usually visit this site once a day and greatly appreciate all the coverage of NCAA Track and Field they deliver.  Most “track and field” websites on the internet focus on distance running so it’s nice to see a website that covers the sport as a whole.  Check it out!

Interesting articles and videos to waste some time with

Bill Russell's response to being left off of Lebron James' "Mount Rushmore" 

Cat Curling (video 0:41) 

Dog eating with hands - hilarious (video 1:46) 

30 signs your town is really small - I can relate 

Wichita State women winning the 4x400m relay at Iowa State (video 4:22) 

Jimmy Fallon and friends doing a Ragtime edition of R Kelly's Ignition (video 2:03) 

Brian Williams and the NBC new crew's version of Rapper's Delight - Brilliant! (video 1:35) 

Haunting photos of the abandoned 1984 Winter Olympics Facilities in Sarajevo 

Wichita State is no fluke, they deserve to be ranked #1 

Full version of the movie Duel (1971) (video 1:29:18) 

Full version of the movie Comedian (2006) (video 1:21:25) 

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) 

The MVC race is heating up, "Her" kind of freaked me out, and I hate commericals

Track

It was a crazy week of track and field for the Shockers.

It started out innocently enough with practice on Monday but that evening Wichita was hit with several inches of snow and school was cancelled for Tuesday and Wednesday.  Although it wasn’t a blizzard, the city of Wichita is not very well equipped to deal with any amount of snow since it doesn’t occur very often.  So when we get even a small amount it can turn most of the city into Armageddon!  For someone who grew up in Ohio and went to college in the Snow Belt, it

always makes me chuckle about how little snow we can have for school to get cancelled.  Even though school was cancelled it didn’t necessarily mean practice would be also.   Unfortunately, our indoor track, the Heskett Center, is operated by the university and not the athletic department so we were not able to practice either day at our track.  After completely taking Tuesday off we were able to practice Wednesday at our indoor baseball facility.  It was better than nothing, and we were thankful to practice, but it wasn’t the same working out in a smaller turf field as compared to our 200m Mondo track.  We had to completely alter our training plan but we made the best of it and focused on our trip to Colorado Springs.

We left for the Air Force Academy the next morning and were welcomed by -7 degree weather and 7000 feet altitude.  Now obviously we are running indoor track so the temperature wasn’t difficult to deal with but the altitude is something that can affect even the best athletes.  We didn’t even take many of our distance runners because of how difficult it is for them to compete at that altitude.

As for the meet itself, we came away feeling just so-so about our performance.  We finished a close 3^rd (out of 4) on both sides.  Our conference rival Indiana State won both meets.  We were hoping to win but knew it would be tough to pull off.  There were a lot of good marks put up but we know we still have a ways to go to be where we want in three weeks at the MVC Indoor Championships.

Colorado Springs is about 7 hours from Wichita and after the meet we drove through the night to get home.  We arrived back in Wichita at 7:30am so the rest of the weekend has been about resting and trying to get back on schedule.  Big time college athletics is not always glamour and glitz, especially when you watch the sunrise on the way home.  Yes it was a strange week indeed.

We are only 20 days away from the start of the MVC Championships and it should be very interesting indeed.  Every Sunday I closely analyze how the rest of the conference is doing and this year has been very different from years past.  The MVC has always been a very good track and field conference yielding individual national champions and numerous top-20 team finishes over my 8 years in the league.  And while that national success is impressive, the strength of the conference is the abilities of each school to build an overall team to compete at the conference level.  This makes winning championships very tough yet very rewarding.

Some schools talk a lot about the conference championships and some try to ignore it, hoping not to put a lot of pressure on the athletes.  We talk about it in our first team meeting in the fall and feel like it helps in building a team focus and chemistry.  There are two ways to look at a conference meet, objectively and subjectively.  Objectively, you can just look at the performance lists on Tfrrs.com and score the meet out.  I do this every week, even though there are athletes that haven’t competed in all their events yet it still stands as a pretty accurate look at how it might turn out.  When you start making predictions or subjectively looking at it you generally have a bias towards your own team.  We try to be very honest about where we are when we talk to our team so we can set realistic goals each meet.

For the last several years, the men’s indoor championship has been a 4-team battle between Wichita State, Indiana State, Northern Iowa and Southern Illinois with all four of those teams winning championships in the past 5 years.  This year looks to be different with the addition of Loyola and the significant improvement of Illinois State.  If I had to predict right now this would be the men’s standings:  1) Indiana State 2) Wichita State 3) Loyola 4) Southern Illinois 5) Illinois State 6) Northern Iowa 7) Drake.

While Indiana State beat us this weekend and they look like the favorites on paper, they don’t give out the trophies for what you do during the regular season and our men are still optimistic they will give a championship effort in three weeks.  We have traditionally competed well at the MVC Indoor Championships and I expect we’ll do so again this year.

The women’s meet is very, very different from the past few years.  Wichita State has won or finished 2^nd in 18 of the past 20 MVC Championships (10 years each for indoor and outdoor) so generally we have had one team as our main competitor through the years.  SIU has been a tough rival as well as Indiana State.  Missouri State won a championship a couple years ago and Northern Iowa and Illinois State have all been in the hunt.  This year it seems that everyone is much more balanced and the championship will be as wide open as ever.  If I had to predict it today, this is what I would say:  1) Southern Illinois 2) Indiana State 3) Wichita State 4) Northern Iowa 5) Loyola 6) Illinois State 7) Missouri State 8) Bradley 9) Drake.

Putting our team in third doesn’t make me feel very good but remember I’m trying to look at it objectively at the moment.  I do think our ladies can win a championship but we’ll have to improve over the next 3 weeks to do it.  The difference between first-sixth is probably 35-40 points, so we will have our hands full with several teams.  This kind of close competition makes for a very stressful yet exhilarating championship week!

This week our team will split up to try and focus on some individual competitions.  We will take a group of sprinters to Iowa State, a group of distance runners to Grand Valley, Michigan, and a few field event athletes to the University of Oklahoma.  The following week will be a tune-up meet for a few athletes so this weekend is really our last big weekend of competition before the MVC Championships.  Hopefully we’ll have more of a normal week of practice and be ready to go!

Movies

When school and practice got cancelled on Tuesday, I took the opportunity to see the movie “Her”.  This movie stars Joaquin Phoenix (Johnny Cash in Walk the Line) and is set “a few years into the future.”  The basic story is how this guy,

who is in the process of getting a divorce, buys a new operating system for his computer/phone/etc that has a level of artificial intelligence that gives it a personality.  Phoenix then starts to develop feelings and a special connection to “Her” and eventually falls in love with his operating system.  While I was watching the movie my main thoughts were about how I’ve never seen a movie like this before and I hope that our society never gets to this point.  All in all I thought it was a very good movie and I’m glad I saw it.  Not all movies should make you feel happy throughout and I think the people who made this movie did a good job of making us think about how technology is affecting our lives.  Hopefully “in the future” we will look back at this movie as a joke, but right now I imagine it could happen – and sooner than we might think!  I give Her 8/10.

I rode the bus with the team this week and we ended up watching a couple movies on the trip.  The first was “Bad Grandpa” from the guys who made the Jackass movies.  It’s a very crude comedy with Johnny Knoxville dressed up like a dirty old man playing pranks on unsuspecting bystanders.  Turns out it was a pretty good movie if you have an open mind about adult humor.  Watching it with a bus full of college kids made for an interesting experience.  On the way back we watched “Hunger Games 2” but I was falling asleep every 10 minutes and didn’t really get to see the whole thing.  What I saw was pretty good but these kinds of movies aren’t in my wheelhouse.

DVD choice of the week (from my collection): I was watching a program about John Belushi on the Biography Channel this week so I thought I’d put “Animal House” (1978) in this section this week.  The original “crazy college movie” is still held up as one of the best comedies of all time and stands up very well to this day.  Most all of my friends have seen this movie so if you haven’t, crawl out of your cave and take a look.  A cool fact about this movie is that it was filmed on the campus of the University of Oregon and in one scene you can easily see Hayward Field (Oregon’s iconic track facility) in the background.  Made for only $3 million dollars, it made $141 million in the states and probably twice that much in video sales.  I know they have at least five of my dollars.  Toga! Toga!

Everything Else

The Winter Olympics got started this week and I have watched bits and pieces of the first few days.  I get frustrated watching the Olympics because of how it is tape delayed and edited with NBC focusing on mostly Americans or people that have unique stories.  My frustration probably stems from the Summer Olympics coverage of track and field and how they try to play to the masses and thus don’t really show the real competition.  I tell people all the time that track and field on TV needs to be shown like golf.  In golf coverage they show all the shots, good and bad, and it builds drama throughout the competition and the focus is on winning, not the score.  In track we get too concerned with how fast

someone is running or how far someone is jumping when we should focus on the competition.  This builds drama and then people would start watching more.  Seeing one pole vault attempt isn’t very interesting and doesn’t represent what really happens.  This is what I see when I watch the Winter Olympics.  Just show the events instead of dumbing it down to the masses.  Let’s build a more intelligent audience that doesn’t think the USA is the only country competing.  The reason March Madness is so exciting and highly watched is because no one knows what is going to happen next.

The other thing with watching the Olympics is how many dang commercials there are.  I am a guy that changes the channel as soon as a commercial comes on so needless to say the Olympics and their multitude of frequent advertising lost me several times.  I know the powerful TV executives aren’t listening to me but if they were, just know that if they put a sponsor logo in the corner of the screen during the competitions it would be far more effective than any commercial (which I wouldn’t see anyways).

Shocker basketball continues to roll on.  This week they took care of Indiana State and Northern Iowa in two tough road games to improve to 25-0.  They are up to #2 in the USA Today Coaches Poll and #4 in the AP.  What an awesome thing we are seeing here in Wichita this year.  And for those who are knocking the Shockers' weak schedule, just keep in mind that Creighton, who finished 2nd to WSU in the Valley last year, is currently the best team in the Big East.  Keep it going guys, what a remarkable accomplishment!

Website of the Week

http://cincinnati.com/blogs/daugherty/

If you are a Cincinnati sports fan then you probably know who Paul Daugherty is.  He’s the long time columnist for the Cincinnati Enquirer and a terrific writer who blogs most mornings on Cincinnati.com.  It is usually one of the things I read during my lunch break at work and, even if I don’t agree with what he says, I am always entertained.  I met him and his wife in an airport one time and he was very gracious.  When he found out I grew up in Brown County he was immediately interested because he bought some land in Adams County a few years ago.  Nice guy, terrific writer.

Interesting articles and videos to waste some time with

Crazy ending to the Weber St/Sacramento St basketball game - video (2:30)

How much snow does it take to cancel school in your area?

2014 IQ Test - I got 120 so I doubt it's very legit

Staying in Sochi for the Olympics is a hilarious adventure

Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis, Samuel Jackson and Toby Maguire - video (5:18)

The 50 most perfectly timed pictures on the Internet 

NBA statistics are starting to get a little crazy - for stat geeks like me

The story of why one of the best track athletes in the nation won't be at NCAA's

This has got to be the biggest quarterback in professional football history - video (1:31) 

Comedians in Cars with Seinfeld interviewing Howard Stern - video (14:48)

Two victories, I might be Dazed and Confused, and Kent State beats Akron

The indoor track season is like a roll of toilet paper.  The closer to the end you get, the faster it goes.

Track

Things are happening fast and furious for our track program!  Besides being in the middle of the indoor season, we have our signing period starting this Wednesday.  That means that there aren’t many days off (an occasional Sunday evening) and as we get closer to our conference meet everything rises in the level of intensity and focus.

Starting off with recruiting, we are sending out several national letters of intent this week for our recruits who want to sign right away at the beginning of the signing period.  Once the signing period begins on Wednesday, we can sign athletes at anytime the rest of the year.  Lots of kids these days have public signings where they invite some press, family, and friends to make a nice event out of it.  It always makes me think back to my own recruitment in high school and how I arrived at deciding for Kent State.  Even though I was the first athlete from my high school to earn a Division I scholarship, my signing wasn’t a major event.  We did it at my family’s dining room table with zero fanfare.  There was a picture in our local newspaper but it was just me acting like I was signing something for the sake of an article.

We probably won’t have an official announcement of our recruits for a couple weeks but you can follow us on twitter @WichitaSt_TFXC as we will be able to let people know who we sign on there when we get their papers.  This is a special time for these young athletes, I know it was a decision that changed my life forever, and it was definitely for the best.

As for our current team, we had our second and final home indoor meet of the season – the Varsity Apartments Invitational.  This has become a terrific meet with great competition from several other quality Division I programs.  Fortunately we were able to win both the men’s and women’s meet and took some strong steps forward in our development as a team.

Our men’s team, which we have known is very strong, easily won the meet.  In fact we outscored second place UT-Arlington 177-103, with Stephen F. Austin in third at 88.  Those are both good track programs so this is further evidence of our strong men’s team.

On the women’s side, we thought it would be a very close meet with SFA.  Our ladies really stepped up this weekend and we won 169-123 over the Lumberjacks with no one else within 100 points.  Our women’s team has been working hard as the “underdogs” this year and the team chemistry is starting to come together.  Even though it wasn’t a perfect weekend, it was a very positive one for us and a lot of fun for the fans that came out to the meet!

Last year when I walked out of this meet I was very frustrated with how my group was performing.  We were struggling with health as well as team chemistry.  They knew it and I knew it.  One year later I couldn’t be happier as we have truly started to become one as a group and focus on the success of the team.  We ended the meet with great efforts in the 4x400m relay and I can’t wait to see how we perform next week.

This weekend we will face an even tougher opponent – Indiana State.  We will see the Sycamores at the Air Force Academy along with host Air Force and Sacramento State in what should be a fantastic quadrangular scored meet.  Indiana State’s men will be our toughest competitor at the upcoming MVC Championships and their women will be one of several teams we will have to defeat.  This meet at Air Force will hopefully give us some confidence that we can accomplish those goals.

As I walked out of the Heskett Center after two consecutive 14 hour work days of hosting the meet, I turned to one of our coaches and said, “I really enjoy having home meets but I really love when they are over.”  Now we get to be on the road until the second week in April when we host the KT Woodman Classic at Cessna Stadium.  The next four weeks will see us travel to Colorado Springs, CO, Ames, IA, Lincoln, NE, Manhattan, KS, and Cedar Falls, IA.  As Willie Nelson sings … On the road again, just can’t wait to get on the road again …

Movies

I was planning to see the movie “Her” this weekend but it fell through at the last minute.  With the craziness of hosting a home competition I was only able to watch a few late night classics on cable as I was replying to emails or falling asleep in bed.  The movies I caught bits and pieces of were “Higher Learning”, “Dazed and Confused” and “The Comebacks”.  Higher Learning is one of the few movies where the main character is a college track athlete and, like lots of movies that try to show track and field, it was unintentionally funny.  Dazed and Confused is great classic movie about high school kids in the 1970’s.  It had early appearances from actors like Matthew McConaughey and Ben Affleck amongst several others.  Great, great movie.  If you haven’t seen it I recommend catching it the next time it’s on Comedy Central.  The Comebacks is a really bad movie that spoofs many other sports movies.  I always enjoyed movies like Airplane and Naked Gun back in the day, and while The Comebacks had some parts that made me laugh I wouldn’t say that many people would like it.  RIP Leslie Nielson!

ESPN does a great job with the 30 for 30 documentary series.  I watched the one about Mary Decker in their Nine for IX series, very good stuff.  I also watched a couple of their short films, "Juding Jewell" about the Atlanta Olympics bombing incident and "The Great Imposter" about Barry Bremen, the guy who would sneak into professional sporting events as a player, coach, umpire, etc.  I have linked them at the end of this blog, both are worth watching if you have 30 minutes.

On a sad note one of the most talented actors of our time, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, died of suspected drug use.  I really liked him in movies like The Big Lebowski, Almost Famous, Capote, and Moneyball.  He always had a great presence on the screen and at age 46 died far too early.

DVD Choice of the Week (from my collection):  I’ve always been a big fan of the horror movie genre so my first choice in that category in this blog will be Audition (1999).  This is a Japanese horror movie made by a director named Takashi Miike.  I heard about this movie while watching a Bravo show about the scariest movie moments so I found it at Best Buy and tried it out.  It starts off very slowly then builds to an incredibly scary and horrifying conclusion that is the worst version of a bad date you can imagine.  Movies like this hardly ever work in the United States because the typical audience member couldn’t sit still long enough through the slow beginning to reach the intense and crazy finish.  It’s all in subtitles but don’t let that scare you away!  The crazy girl in the movie is scary enough!

Everything Else

I need to continue to mention Shocker basketball as they are now one of only two undefeated teams in the nation (Syracuse being the other).  They are now 23-0 and have their toughest road stretch of the season coming up this week at Indiana State and Northern Iowa.  All I can say is they are doing incredible and I hope they keep this undefeated streak going as long as they can.  I was able to attend the game on Tuesday against Loyola when our track team got honored at halftime for their academic excellence.  Koch Arena is one of the special college basketball venues – always a great time!  Congrats to Gregg Marshall and the entire basketball operation for an unbelievable run!

I finished up my taxes this week which is always a good thing.  I know a lot of people that put it off as long as possible but I never understood that because all they are putting off is getting back some of their own money.  I say give me back the money as soon as possible since it’s mine anyways!

One thing you realize when you are consumed for most of the weekend at a track meet is there is so much that happens during weekend that you never even realized.  This weekend my alma mater Kent State defeated rival Akron in basketball on a last second hail mary shot.  I only happened to see it because one of my college teammates posted the video online.  HERE IT IS.  “Fight on for KSU, Fight for the Blue and Gold! We’re out to beat the foe; Fight on brave and bold!  Fight on for victory, Don’t stop until we’re through.  We’re all together, Let’s go forward, K-S-U!”  Always great to beat Akron!

The Super Bowl turned out to be a dud of a game.  We have an annual party at Coach Rainbolt’s house with our coaching staff and families.  I was hoping Peyton Manning would make Richard Sherman look bad but it wasn’t to be.  Congrats to the Seahawks, they definitely deserved to win!

Website of the Week

http://www.ustfccca.org/

This is the website for college track and field provided by the United States Track and Field and Cross Country Coaches Association.  Tom Lewis does much of the work on this site and he does an incredible job of organizing everything there is about all levels of college track.  The weekly results section is where I spend most of my time but it has just about everything a college track fan would need.

Interesting articles and videos to waste your time with

An early version of film critics Siskel & Ebert show where they talk about "Cult Films" 

Can't stop laughing after watching this contemporary dance video

19 hard things you need to do to be successful

30 for 30 short film "Judging Jewell"

30 for 30 short film "The Great Imposter"

First road trip, Machete Kills Again, and Dorf got engaged!

It was another busy week in Shockerland …

Track

Last weekend we had our season opener at home so this week was our first road trip of the indoor season.  Coming off a competition for the first time all year presents several challenges.  The athletes are a little more sore and fatigued than after a typical weekend so we have shifted to a lighter Monday of practice than we used to.  While it’s great to give those athletes a little more recovery time it makes for a difficult organization of the practice week, especially when you compete on Friday and Saturday the following week.  Sprinters and explosive athletes have to have time to recover from the intensity of competing or, over time, fatigue will take over.  As coaches we are always trying to get a little more out of each workout when sometimes the best thing to do is rest.  It’s a truly difficult thing to balance, something that I struggle with all the time.  The beginning of the competitive season always makes this difficulty come to light.

We were able to have a good week of practice, however.  The good thing about having our first official meet of the season last week is that it motivates the athletes with direct results.  That’s the great thing about our sport – there is your name with a performance next to it and you can’t blame anyone else if it’s not what you wanted.  You can only come to practice the next day motivated to get better – at least that’s the way highly successful athletes react.  Our workout on Tuesday was probably the best one we’ve had all year.  It usually takes a couple weeks to see the benefit of a workout so I assume when we go to the Air Force Academy in 2 weeks we’ll run very well.

We traveled up to Lincoln, Nebraska, for our traditional 2^nd meet of the year.  We competed in two meets, Friday was a small college open meet and Saturday was a scored quadrangular against Nebraska, UT-Arlington and Oral Roberts.  Having athletes compete on both days gives them the experience of what it will be like at the MVC Championships later this indoor season as well as giving the younger athletes a little bit of transition into collegiate competition.  Overall the weekend went pretty well, on Saturday both our men’s and women’s teams finished 2^nd behind Nebraska and outperformed our pre-meet scoring projection.  This is the first of three consecutive scored meets for our team.  Having team scored competitions helps us get ready for the most important scored meet of the year – the MVC Championships.

The other great thing about heading out of town for a road trip is the team bonding that naturally happens.  Traveling on a bus, staying in a hotel, going out to dinner – all of these things contribute to our team becoming more of a “team”, which is critical to our success later in the year.

Next week we’ll be home again in a very good team scored competition against Stephen F. Austin, UT-Arlington, Missouri State, Oral Roberts, Iowa Central and Butler County.  If you live anywhere close to Wichita you should try to make it, it will be a terrific college track and field meet!  If you can’t make it be sure to watch live on UStream.com, search “Shockertrack”.

We are about a week away from the national signing date so we are working hard to get the best recruiting class we can.  After the signing date, we will probably have a press release announcing many of our new recruits.  Stay tuned because there are some good ones already committed to Wichita State!

Movies

I didn’t get out to the movie theater this week for two reasons.  It was a very busy week and there’s not much out there that I want to see.  The Kevin Hart/Ice Cube comedy Ride Along is the popular movie right now so other than that I’m not too disappointed in not seeing anything.  I caught the last half of Billy Madison on cable, the part where he does the academic Decathlon.  Classic.  It’s great to be reminded Adam Sandler used to be funny.

Even though it wasn’t a movie, one late night on ESPN Classic, I caught a couple episodes of Battle of the Network Stars, a late 1970’s/early 1980’s athletic competition pitting ABC, NBC, and CBS celebrities against each other in a variety of team sports.  It was so unintentionally funny that it was hard not to stop watching at 2am on a Tuesday night.  My athletes are about 1/100 as dramatic as these actors and Howard Cosell was the creepiest announcer I’ve ever seen.  Every interview he did with an actress made for totally awkward television.  The final event of the competition was the running relay.  Oh lord, where do I begin.  I’m pretty sure the “staggers” on the track were not IAAF certified, and it didn’t matter anyways because the runners only used the lanes as a loose guide around the track.  Watching them make relay passes was akin to seeing bumper cars bang into each other at the local county fair.  It was totally awful yet better than most any reality show on TV today.  If you have ESPN Classic you gotta check it out the next time it’s on.

DVD choice of the week (from my collection):  The last few weeks I have mentioned some movies that were either critically popular or box office successful.  This week I’ll go another direction with one of my all-time favorites, Machete (2010).  One of the reasons I was initially interested in this movie was because I was actually in Austin, Texas, staying in a hotel across the street when it was being filmed.  It’s a ridiculous, over the top movie about an ex-Federale (played by Danny Trejo) who goes on a killing rampage to take down the bad guys and save every pretty girl in sight.  One of the pretty girls is Michelle Rodriguez, one of my personal favorite actresses.  Even though the movie wasn’t a critical success, it grew a big enough cult following to have a sequel (Machete Kills Again).  Unfortunately I was one of the few people who went to the theater to see that one and I doubt Machete Kills In Space will ever get made.  If you aren’t too interested in a serious plot and enjoy a little gratuitous violence then Machete may be just the movie for you.

Everything Else

We had a big event occur in our track office this past week as our throws coach John Hetzendorf got engaged to his long time girlfriend Amber McGown.  Amber, who is from Canada, was a terrific middle distance runner for Cornell and Oregon before joining the Oregon Track Club after graudation.  Most of you probably

know that “Dorf” was one of the best Javelin throwers in the United States for over a decade.  I’m assuming their kids will probably be heptathletes or decathletes.  Dorf joined our jumps coach Heidi Yost in getting engaged recently so that only leaves myself and our Pole Vault coach Pat Wilson as the bachelors of the staff.  Pat – if this is a competition for seeing who will be single the longest, then you are in trouble my friend.

As I write this, it is in the mid 60’s in Wichita.  Tomorrow the high will be 25.  It’s been up and down like that for a few weeks and will continue for another month or so.  Hopefully our athletes (and myself) can keep from getting sick!  Too many important things coming up in the next few weeks!

I talked my way out of jury duty next week.  I think the court clerk is a Shocker fan.  However, I will be making up my jury duties in March so all you troublemakers out there beware!

Website of the Week

http://www.imdb.com/

The website IMDB is to movies what Sports-Reference.com is to sports.  It’s simply the best website to find all kinds of information about any movie ever made.  Like the sport-reference site it came from humble beginnings and the passion of a movie fan.  Now it is an incredibly fun and hugely informative website to spend countless hours.  Enjoy!

Interesting articles/videos to waste some time with

The coolest president in the world

Jamaica is going to the Winter Olympics in the Bobsled!

Songs that are secretly about Track - Phoebe Wright blog 

Shocker Basketball's success is bringing out the crazy fans in Wichita

Top-10 ways to ensure you best people will quit

The most entertaining ping pong match in history 

Jonah Hill's Saturday Night Live monologue with special guest Leonardo DiCaprio

Season opener, ups and down, and I love Moneyball

It’s been a very busy week (in a good way) so I don’t have much outside of track to talk about …

Track

A lot has happened in the past seven days with Wichita State Track &Field.  Our athletes returned to campus, we had our first official week of practice in 2014 and we had our first track meet of the indoor season.

As I had mentioned previously, the coaching staff always gets a little nervous wondering how our athletes train over the winter break because of how short the indoor season is once they get back (we have our MVC Championship meet in 5 weeks).  I have the athletes I coach keep a daily journal of their training.  This helps for a few reasons:  1) It keeps them focused and being more of a student of their event through daily discipline of writing a journal and analyzing their training.  2) I collect them every few weeks and it helps me understand how they’re feeling and thinking – sometimes the athletes don’t always communicate little injuries or other things that could be bothering them.  It’s very helpful when they come back from the break so I can see exactly how their training went while away.  I always tell the athletes to be as honest as possible, even if it means writing that they missed a workout, so we can adjust training if necessary to avoid injuries.

Tuesday was our first real tough speed endurance workout after the break and I’d say it went decent.  There were some really great workouts and some workouts that didn’t go so well.  That’s usually the case and this break we had several kids who missed training because of a variety of sicknesses.  The effort was good, however, and all we can do is try to improve every week from here on out.

We hosted our season opener on Friday and Saturday (Herm Wilson Invitational).  As with all track meets, especially season openers, there were lots of good and lots of areas that need work.  I would say the bright spot was the overall performance of our men’s team.  We know we have a good men’s team this year but until you start seeing actual performances in a meet you aren’t 100% for sure.  We had real good results from our upperclassmen as well as some surprisingly positive results from the freshmen.  What was even better was that a couple of our new January transfers really competed well and it looks like they will give us that extra boost we need.  Two new athletes, Ugis Jocis from Latvia and Dave Brandhoff from The Netherlands, won the mile (4:15) and high jump (6-11.75), respectively.  I was very proud of freshmen Tate Annis (200m) and Jon Duvall (60h, 200m) for having great performances as freshmen.  Your first collegiate competition can be a humbling experience and these 4 athletes started their careers with doing some humbling of their own!

As for our women’s team, we knew that losing some of last year’s seniors was going to be tough to replace.  After the meet we now have an even clearer picture of how thin a margin of error we have.  We definitely have some very talented young ladies but we will need to get much better to be a factor against Southern Illinois, Indiana State and the rest of the MVC in 5 weeks.  Hopefully our next meet at Nebraska this weekend will be a positive step towards that result.

For the last several years we have gone to the University of Nebraska for our 2^nd indoor meet of the year.  We have a great relationship with their coaches and appreciate them inviting us every year.  This year we will be competing against Nebraska, Oral Roberts and UT-Arlington in a scored quad meet.  Nebraska has a great track and field program and although we’ve been close, we’ve never beat them on their home track.  We’ve also never lost to UT-Arlington or Oral Roberts since I’ve been here (2006).  It should be a good meet at a great facility with good competition!

Having a home meet is always great, but hosting the meet takes a lot of work by a lot of people.  Sometimes when I meet someone for the first time and they find out I’m a college track coach I often get the question, “So what else do you do besides coach track?”  What a lot of people don’t realize is how much work goes in to recruiting, hosting home competitions, administrative duties and so on.  A couple years ago I detailed what a week in my life is like during May.  I warn you it’s a very long blog but it will give you an idea of what a 97 hour work week looks like (and I didn’t do anything else besides track haha).  Here is the link to that story.

Recruiting is also in full swing right now and most of the rest of my weekend has been busy with that.  We only have a couple weeks left until the beginning of our signing period so we are busy getting recruits in and trying to convince them to be Shockers!  We only graduate 7 women this year (out of 65) but we plan on signing around 15 men and 15 women.  Currently we have about 6 women already committed along with a couple guys.  I really wish I could go into more detail about recruiting because I think it’s an interesting thing to learn about but NCAA rules prohibit me to publicly give a lot of detail.  One thing is for sure - recruiting never stops!

Movies

Due to the business of the week I did not see any movies.  In fact I barely watched television or surfed the Internet for non-work related items.  I’ve heard really good things about Lone Survivor, the Mark Wahlberg war movie but I probably won’t be able to see that for a while.  The only other movie that looks interesting to me is Her, starring Joaquin Phoenix about a guy who falls in love with the operating system of his phone/computer.  Obviously this is set in the future but I can imagine not too far into the future with the way technology is taking over our lives.

DVD Choice of the Week (from my personal collection):  Moneyball (2011) starring Brad Pitt.  I really like this movie and I like the book even more.  It’s about how the Oakland A’s changed their philosophy (and the rest of baseball followed eventually) by utilizing complex baseball statistics to compete with a smaller budget against much bigger budget professional baseball teams.  This movie appeals to me for a variety of reasons.  I’ve always been a sports stat geek.  As a kid the first thing I read with regularity was box scores in the Cincinnati Enquirer newspaper and eventually I would do all kinds of stats for any sport I was interested in or playing.  I even had my parents keeping stats during my elementary age baseball and basketball games before we got a video camera and I then could do them myself at home after the game.  It also appeals to me for the behind the scenes aspect of what it takes to build a team.  This is what I love about college track and field – building a team and seeing them become successful.  While Billy Beane has a budget he has to stay within, we have scholarship limits to stay within and you’re always negotiating with athletes, trying to figure out what is the proper worth of each one in terms of trying to build a championship team.  If I ever get tired of being a track coach (which will never happen) I’m gonna try my hand at being a general manager of a professional team.  The book is better than the movie but the movie is very good – check it out!

Everything Else

Since this week was pretty much totally about track and field there wasn’t much time for anything else.  I have to mention the Shocker Basketball squad who is currently 19-0 and ranked 5^th in the nation (soon to be 4^th this week).  I am so fortunate to be working at Wichita State during this special time.  I know the basketball coaches and how hard they work so I’m very happy for them and the players.  Our track kids are friends with most of the basketball players too so it’s fun to see them excited and have so much school spirit for Wichita State.  I was also lucky enough to be coaching at Kent State in 2002 when they won 26 games in a row and came within a breath of the Final Four.  I guess that’s my good luck for being at two schools that either have no football team or a historically bad football team. Ha!

I saw that my Bengals lost both their offensive and defensive coordinators to NFL head coaching positions so hopefully they can recover from that.  I’ve always liked Mike Zimmer (Bengals defensive coordinator and new Vikings head coach).  He’s a straight shooter that gets a lot of respect from his players.  His clips from the HBO series Hard Knocks were the best part of the show for me.  Who-Dey!  Congrats to my 2^nd favorite team, the Seattle Seahawks for earning a trip to the Super Bowl.  I really like Peyton Manning so hopefully that will be a great game in a blizzard in NYC!

Here’s an example of how busy this week was.  I did a load of laundry on Wednesday and as I am typing this on Sunday evening it is still sitting in the dryer.  Totally forgot they were in there.  Anyone know a good maid service?

Website of the Week

http://www.sports-reference.com/

In keeping with the sports statistics topic, this website, which is actually seven websites, is a stat lovers dream.  It’s as complete a database of statistics on professional, college, and Olympic sports as I’ve found on the Internet.  It isn’t very difficult to waste several hours just clicking on page after page of stats and information.  And the cool thing was it was started by a fellow stat geek because of his passion and it has grown into one of the most impressive websites I’ve ever seen.  Another thing I love about it is that it is almost totally text based without pictures, videos, etc to slow down your viewing speed!

Interesting articles and other things to waste some time with

---Top 10 longest long jump fouls of all time (video)

---Nike running shoe prototype goes for $1500, discovered in a back yard

---Want to fix college athletics? Major in Sports

---Starting blocks lesson, hilarious (video)