MVC Championships: we win a title, we lose a title - how are we supposed to feel?

Well it was a wild weekend of track and field in Carbondale, Illinois, where the Shockers were able to win the women’s title and place second in the men’s meet by 11.5 points.

If this blog is a good news, bad news kind of thing I’ll start with the bad (although it wasn’t all that bad).

MEN

We were picked to win the men’s meet but we knew it would be tough because of several injuries we had during the season.  The most significant loss we had during the outdoor season was freshman multi-eventer Hunter Veith, who had scored over 7000 points in his first ever Decathlon and would probably be able to score in a couple more events during the weekend.  On top of that we had lost about 8 other athletes to injury during the indoor or outdoor seasons that would’ve been contributors.

Even with all that we still had a team that could’ve won and prior to the meet we had us as a 12 point favorite on paper.  One of the problems with that projection was that we didn’t have a whole lot of move up points left available for our top athletes – they were already ranked first or very high in the conference standings.  That made our lead on paper have a very thin margin for error – especially with a team as good as Indiana State behind us in second.

We had a very tough time picking our 32 guys, even tougher than I detailed during the indoor season.  Two weeks before the championship we still had about 45 guys in the running for those 32 spots and after our final meet we had 37 guys that we all wanted to make the team.  How do you pick 32 guys when you need all 37?  At that point we made our best guesses about how the entries would look and who would perform the best.  In hindsight we made good decisions and the fact that 29 of our 32 guys scored points individually proved that fact.

We started the meet very well and everything looked good early.  We ended up scoring 153 points where we had projected 158 so the guys really did do a great job.  Indiana State just had a great meet (especially on Saturday) and outperformed their form chart by 18 points.  We could point at a couple events where we had let downs but that’s the way all championship meets go.  It was a hard fought meet that came down to the last events and our guys battled hard.  Hopefully we learned some lessons and next year will be even hungrier to try and figure out a way to beat those guys from Terre Haute.

WOMEN

The women’s meet was the opposite of the men’s as we were picked second behind Indiana State heading into the meet.  We have won a lot of women’s championships in recent years and our ladies just seem to know how to compete and win titles when it counts.  We had Indiana State as a significant favorite heading into the meet – 36 points – and we knew we needed to get off to a quick start.

That’s exactly what happened as we cut the projected lead in half on day one before holding form on day two.  We figured them as a 16 point favorite heading into Sunday and needed some good things to happen.  Right away good things happened.  We got a four point swing in the triple jump and our 4x100m relay team took second place while Indiana State didn’t finish.  From that point we continued to build our lead until clinching the title with a few events left.

28 of our 32 girls scored in this meet which is the deepest team we’ve ever had.  Add into the fact that we return over 90% of our points and we feel really good about where our women’s team is heading into next year.

OVERALL

One of the strangest feelings you can ever have is winning a championship and losing a close battle in the same day at virtually the same time.  I try to explain the feeling to people like this – Imagine your team just won the World Series in Game 7 on a dramatic finish, now imagine you also coach the other team that just lost.  How are you supposed to feel?

We were so happy to win that women’s championship but so frustrated in losing the men.  I’m sure Indiana State felt the same way.  In my 8 years at Wichita State we’ve won both men’s and women’s titles but only once (2010 indoor) have we won both at the same time.  That was an incredible feeling and what we work for every day to try and duplicate.

It’s great having a rivalry with a team like Indiana State who is, obviously, working just as hard at it as we are.  I’m sure they are back home this week trying to figure out how to win both titles next year as well.  We have a great conference and winning a championship is definitely earned!

LOOKING AHEAD

No we are on to the NCAA West Preliminaries in Arkansas next week.  We have at least 15 Shockers qualified at the moment and hopefully will get a few more in that are on the bubble Thursday.

The season has just flown by and now we are almost done!  Coming up we have the NCAA Prelims, NCAA Championship Finals, USATF Championships, and USA Junior Championships before taking a break around July.  It’s been a great year and hopefully we will have our elite athletes earn a few all-American awards in the next few weeks.  Go Shocks!

MVC Outdoor Championship Week!

This is going to be a short blog because it’s the extremely busy week called MVC Outdoor Championship Week!

Our team heads to Southern Illinois on Wednesday and we will compete Friday/Saturday/Sunday.  I believe our men will be a narrow favorite over Indiana State while our women will probably be second on paper behind the Sycamores.

We had an incredible battle to make our 32 man and 32 woman rosters.  I’m going to try and detail a little more of that next week.  As for now we are preparing our 64 Shockers for the final conference championship of the season.  After that we will begin the NCAA Championships.

To keep up to date with the MVC Championships, follow along at the official MVC Championships Central Page, our WSU Twitteraccount, or our Facebook page.  Go Shockers!

The Shockers beat Kansas and Kansas State --- what does it mean?

This past weekend we had the opportunity to compete against our in-state Division I rivals Kansas State and Kansas in a scored competition (along with the Air Force Academy).  We ended up defeating all three teams on both the men’s and women’s sides and our kids proudly left the facility with their heads held high.

The meet was scored in dual meet fashion and here were the scores:

MEN

Wichita St 104, Kansas St 81

Wichita St 99, Kansas 86

Wichita St 113, Air Force 85

WOMEN

Wichita St 94, Kansas St 92

Wichita St 98.5, Kansas 84.5

Wichita St 117, Air Force 76

I have a few thoughts about the meet …

First of all had a really nice meet with lots of season bests and many victories during the course of the day.  We finally had a meet with warm weather and not much wind so our athletes got some legal (not wind aided) races as well as our long sprinters got to run races without a fierce wind on one side of the track.  It helped our placing in the MVC standings and with less than two weeks to go we are feeling pretty confident about our chances for one or maybe two titles.  All in all we got a lot accomplished as a team!

But what does it really mean?

Last week I lightheartedly referred to this meet as the “Battle of Kansas”.  Does it mean we have the best team in Kansas?  Will it propel us to victories in the MVC Championships in two weeks?  Will we get more recruits because we can brag about beating KU and K-State in head to head competition?  Will we qualify more athletes to the NCAA Championships this year?

I don’t know the answers to any of those questions.  But what it does do is make me think about our sport on a larger scale.  This is one of the few meets that we got mentioned on local television and in the Wichita Eagle newspaper.  The reason is, obviously, because we beat our in-state rivals.  But there are problems with this.

I don’t think Kansas and Kansas State were too thrilled that we beat them in the meet but I also don’t think they care too much because at the end of the day winning a meet like this doesn’t mean anything except for bragging rights.  That’s a major problem with our sport.  Kansas State hosted a very nice meet and can talk about several victories and outstanding performances they had.  Kansas can do the same, and in fact they didn’t even mention the team scores in their press release.  Is that good?  Is it ok that every team can spin their press release to make it look like they were successful?

Kansas might have been able to win the meet if they entered their athletes in more events (as could’ve K-State), but they didn’t because the bigger goal is to get ready for the Big-12 Championships.  I don’t blame them at all, we did the same thing by not doubling our best athletes as well, but shouldn’t winning this meet mean something more than bragging rights?  What if winning this meet meant Wichita State (or KU/KSU) would earn more national qualifiers?  Would they “try” to win a lot more then?

None of this should diminish the accomplishments of our men and women this weekend, in fact we have very strong outdoor track and field teams.  We expected to win the men's meet and thought our women had a chance although winning that meet was probably a slight upset.  Our men's team will probably be favored to beat Indiana State at the MVC Championships in two weeks - and Indiana State is REALLY good.

Our coaches association is trying to change the culture of the sport but most of the things I’ve heard doesn’t really address questions like the ones I’m talking about.  I’ve heard rumors that there are changes coming in the near future but will it make our regular season more important than just preparation for the conference and NCAA Championships?  Our basketball team had to win many regular season games to earn a better seed for the NCAA Tournament.  Everyone knows each game means something and that creates lots of interest.

I love our sport, in fact I think it’s the most pure and beautiful sport there is.  I just wish that beating KU and K-State meant more than just having bragging rights.

The Kansas track rivalry heats up this week, a look at the MVC race, and it's windy in Wichita!

Track

We just had an odd weekend in the world of outdoor track and field – an off weekend.  Well sort of.

As we put our schedule together this year we knew the week following the Oregon Relays (which were right after the KT Woodman) would probably be a time our athletes would be tired so we decided to have an off weekend to give our kids a chance to rest and recover as we prepare for the final regular season meets of the year.

We did have a meet, however, as we took some of the athletes who didn’t go to Oregon up to Emporia State on Wednesday night for the ESU Midweek Open.  We got some nice, warm weather and those who competed did a great job putting up several personal records.  Not making the trip to Oregon was tough to take for many of those athletes but they responded beautifully with terrific results at Emporia.

I decided to give the group Thursday off from practice and we had a spirited final day of the week for Friday’s practice.  Now that the weekend is behind us, the team looks refreshed and ready for our meet at Kansas State Saturday.  We have a great meet planned this weekend as we’ll compete against Kansas State, Kansas, and the Air Force Academy in a scored competition.  The weather forecast looks good and we should be ready to put up some big results.

 

We’ve always wanted to have scored meets against our in-state Division I rivals but haven’t been able to do so until this year.  I am happy to announce that beginning next year we will start our indoor season with a scored triangular meet with Kansas-Kansas State-Wichita State.  The meet will rotate between the three schools for 2015, 2016, and 2017.  It will be a great way to showcase track and field in Kansas and another chance for us to compete against these Big 12 schools, including the defending national champion Jayhawks.

I haven’t mentioned much about the MVC race in the previous weeks but it is starting to become a little clearer now.  Just like always, the MVC Outdoor Championships should be a close battle between several teams.  I always score the meet straight off the performance lists every week to see how we stack up and at the moment the lists say we have a slight lead on the men’s side and are in second place on the women’s.  With the exception of the 10k, most athletes have competed in their main events so this gives us a pretty good look at where we stand.  Here is what the “off the list” scores are:

Men: Wichita St 149, Indiana St 135, Loyola 127, Northern Iowa 112, Southern Illinois 109, Illinois St 91, Drake 73, Bradley 19.

Women:  Indiana St 159, Wichita State 128, Missouri St 105, Southern Illinois 104, Loyola 90, Northern Iowa 87, Illinois St 67, Bradley 41, Drake 37.

As you can see we have a very balanced league and I would say any of the top five men’s teams should be considered for the title as well as the top four women’s teams.  If you remember the indoor championship our women significantly outperformed our projection and came from about 60 points down to lose by 13.  We’re gonna need another performance like that to defeat Indiana State while our men look to be on more equal footing with the Sycamores.  They are the defending champions and we know they will be ready to go.  We’ve been working hard though and our teams are hungry for a title!  It should be a great weekend of track and field in Carbondale, Illinois, in three weeks!

The one thing that has been a big disadvantage for us is that most of our meets have been so windy.  The NCAA and our conference doesn’t allow times when the wind is over 4.0 meters per second and in some cases we have athletes who haven’t had a single race under that standard.  I think we have some very good kids that should factor significantly when we’re all on the same track together and hopefully this will give us the boost we need.  The wind also significantly hinders the races around the track.  The weather this Saturday looks good so hopefully we get some legal times to put on the board.

With having an off weekend from competition I got busy in recruiting by getting out to a couple local high school meets.  There are always meets going on in the Wichita area and most Tuesday and Friday nights can be spent scouting out the local talent.  Most of our recruiting for the class of 2014 has been completed so much of the work is in seeing the class of 2015 kids for the first time.  And while “most” of the 2014 class of recruiting is done, it’s not totally done so being at a meet when a new senior pops up is always a good thing.

For the time being, I’m only going to be writing about track and field because, well, that’s about all that I have going on at this time of the year.  I’ll try to add in some new movie stuff when I actually start watching them again!  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) 

Be back next week!

It’s one of those super busy weeks so I’m not able to update this blog.  Hopefully I’ll be back next week!