End of season wrap-up, new NCAA format and some thoughts on performance enhancing drugs

Sorry for the delay in writing this blog but I’ve been busy sleeping and procrastinating.

NCAA Championships

We took five athletes out to the NCAA Outdoor Championships in Eugene, Oregon, last week and had mixed results.  The Division I Outdoor meet is as competitive as it gets.  Case in point, last place in the men’s 100m dash finals was 10.04.

Out top finisher was Nikki Larch-Miller, who finished eighth in the Heptathlon and earned First-Team All-American honors.  Our 4x100m relay team ended up 16^th overall and earned Second-Team All-American honors.  I was proud of our ladies.  Running in the highly stressful 4x100m relay on that stage and on national television can be very intimidating and they handled themselves well.  They didn’t run their best time of the year but they did run their second best time.  Going home All-Americans was the goal and achieving that is something they’ll never forget.

Now the goal will be to get back there again as soon as we can.

Here are a couple articles prior to the meet about our kids …

Deja Young finds a place to run at Wichita State
Weston Cottrell's long journey to be a WSU legend

What’s left in the season?

Not much, but there are still a few athletes finishing up their season in big meets.

Nikki Larch-Miller will head back to Eugene, Oregon, for the USA Championships Heptathlon next week.  She will be amongst the top-16 heptathletes in the country (including professionals).  It’ll be a great experience for Nikki as she begins to compete at a higher level, hopefully for the rest of her career.  She did terrific in fighting out an eighth place finish at the NCAA’s so I expect she’ll compete hard again and do well next week.

We have two athletes heading to Oregon with Nikki for the USA Junior Championships (held in conjunction with the USA Championships).  Carlea Holt (Heptathlon, Javelin) and Dray Carson (10k) are redshirt freshmen who qualified in their events and will get a great experience competing at Hayward Field.

I have two other athletes still competing as well.  Deja Young (you can read the article above about her) is currently competing at the USA Paralympics Championships in St. Paul, Minnesota, while Nora Zajovics will be representing her home country of Hungary this weekend in the European Team Championships.

The track season is coming to a close!

New format of NCAA’s

A lot has been said about the new format of the NCAA Championships so I guess I’ll throw in my two cents.

The “new format” that was used was the men and women were separated.  The men competed Wednesday/Friday and the women Thursday/Saturday.  At our national convention we voted to approve this format as ESPN had promised a ton of live TV coverage.  As you might guess many traditional fans of T&F weren’t sure if this would work and many thought the women’s meet might suffer in attendance.

Luckily we were in TrackTown, USA, and the hometown team won both team championships.  Friday and Saturday drew sellout crowds and the TV ratings released just a couple days ago showed record levels of viewership for the NCAA T&F Championships.  It made the meet easier to follow for the casual fan and, as someone who was at the meet, I can say that the 2.5 hour meet schedule was perfect to keep everyone into it and excited.

I give the new format a thumbs up.

Performance enhancing drugs

If you are part of the track and field world you’ve probably heard about the recent accusations of Alberto Salazar and some of his runners, namely American distance stud Galen Rupp.

I’m not here to give an opinion on that situation because I don’t have enough information to give an intelligent thought but it got me to thinking about something that’s frustrating.

New York Yankees baseball player Alex Rodriguez, who is being celebrated for getting 3000 career hits this week, served a 162 game suspension (one year, the longest ever suspension in baseball) for admitting steroid use for several years early in his career and during a rehab stint later in this career.

Currently the top sprinter in the world Justin Gatlin, who is being roundly criticized because of his past, is in his fourth year running again after serving a four YEAR suspension for testing positive.

For the record I am totally against anyone using performance enhancing drugs and have no problem with them being suspended or banned from their sport.  My problem is how there is no consistency through various professional sports in what the consequences are as well as how this is portrayed in the media (and general public).

Some of track and field’s only media exposure comes when a top athlete tests positive for a banned substance and gets a four year ban while a football player gets … wait for it … wait for it … a four GAME suspension for the same offence.  Not only that, but the level of science behind the testing in track and field far surpass anything in the more mainstream sports like baseball, football and basketball.

The double standard by folks reporting it in the media baffles me.  I guess since they don’t know much about track and field they feel like they can report on illegal drugs when it comes up in our sport.

I won’t be rooting for or against Alex Rodriguez or Justin Gatlin this year.  A-Rod admitted his wrongdoings after years of saying he was innocent while Gatlin has always maintained his innocence.  I like to think the best of people and believe in the American way of innocent until proven guilty as well as forgiving people who admit they are wrong.  I know I’m not perfect and I’m not going to hold judgement when I don’t really know what is going on with a certain athlete.

I just hope that the powers that run the media become more consistent with their reporting on the subject.  Track and Field has a lot of great athletes and coaches doing it the right way and if you’re going to report the bad make sure to report the good as well.

What’s next?

I’m actually not traveling for a few weeks and trying to take a little downtime.  There is plenty to do around the office as we finish up recruiting and plan for the 2015-16 year.  We should release a list of all our new signees shortly but believe it or not we’re still trying to bring in a few more kids.

Once July rolls around it will start a new recruiting cycle and I’ll hit the road to meet some of the new crop from the 2016 class.

Next blog

Not sure when the next one will be but I won’t take a whole month off from blogging this year.  I’ve had several people talk to me about when I will talk about movies again so maybe I’ll come up with something for that.

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

5 Shockers heading to NCAA's and the unlikely story of our 4x100m relay

I’m a little bleary eyed from an all-night drive home from Texas last night/this morning but it was worth it as we had some terrific things happen in Austin.

NCAA West Prelims

The format of the NCAA Outdoor Championships is an unusual one.  The country is split in half and the top-48 in each event (top-24 relays) compete in the East and West NCAA Prelims in hopes of finishing in the top-12 and advancing to the NCAA Finals in Eugene, Oregon, in two weeks.

It’s truly a survive and advance situation for many athletes.  Many, many NCAA Division I track and field programs don’t advance a single athlete past the NCAA Prelims.  We are fortunate to have five athletes heading to Tracktown, USA, next week.

Hammer Time

The Hammer Throw is one of the least glamorous of events in a track and field meet so often they go unnoticed.  This year Coach John Hetzendorf has built a great group of throwers and that was apparent Thursday when Weston Cottrell placed fifth to advance to the NCAA Championships and three Shockers placed in the top-20.  WSU was the only team to accomplish that feat.

It was extra special for Weston as he has battled numerous injuries throughout his career and last year fouled all three throws at the NCAA West Prelims.

Nikki Larch-Miller continues to amaze

Without a doubt Nikki Larch-Miller is the MVP of our team this year and she had another great meet this weekend.  After narrowly missing qualifying in the Long Jump Thursday, she advanced through the rounds to finish eighth overall in the 100m hurdles and qualify for Oregon.  She is also already qualified in the Heptathlon and 4x100m relay as well so she will be competing in at least NINE events (potentially 11) at the NCAA Championships.

If the track and field world hasn’t heard of Nikki yet they soon will.

The story of our 4x100m relay

One of the most unlikely qualifiers to the NCAA Championships was our women’s 4x100m relay squad.  It’s not unlikely in terms of not having potential to do well but in the way that everything unfolded.  I work with this group so this story is especially significant to me.

We’ve had some nice relays in recent years and even won a couple of MVC titles but not had any type of NCAA success.  In fact we’ve never had a women’s relay team advance to the NCAA Championships.

Just getting into the NCAA West Prelims was a struggle this year.  They only take 24 teams and the difference from teams 13-24 heading in to the meet was 0.2 of a second.  We were on the outer edge of that all year long.  At the MVC Championships we ran 45.23 to improve from our 45.32 the previous week.  At the time I thought that would make it in easily.  After seeing more results come in that day we eventually dropped to #24 and looked like we would be the last team in!  After the declaration period, three teams decided not to enter and we ended up going into the meet ranked #21.  We had made it by 0.05 of a second.

When the heat sheets came out we got lane 9.  Most athletes hate being in the extreme outside of the track but I thought this might be good for us.  The host school, Texas, was in lane 8 and had one of the best 4x1’s in the country.  I had the feeling that if we could get pulled along by them early in the race it could get us where we needed to be.  Of the 8 teams in the race we were ranked #7.

The night before the race I got the four girls on the relay together – Senior Shanice Andrews, Freshman Deja Young, and Nikki and Taylor Larch-Miller.  We talked about that the only way that we would have a chance of advancing is if we walked into that track KNOWING we were going to advance and believing in each other completely.  Our handoffs have been one of the things that had held us back in running fast times this year and having trust in your teammates is one of the most significant things you need in a good relay.

Then right as soon as the team started warming up a lightning/weather delay hit the meet and everyone was forced to take cover and wait.  It didn’t bother our girls as they kept a great focus and eventually it was time to run the race.

Shanice Andrews, who was the only senior of 19 athletes we took to the meet, got out to a strong start and executed a terrific baton pass to our freshman Deja Young.  This was the pass that concerned our coaching staff the most and when it went well we felt like we had a chance.  Texas was running very well inside of us just like we thought and we were being pulled down the backstretch.

I need to take a short break to explain something about our second runner.  Deja Young, from near Dallas, Texas, was born with a deformity in her right arm (in fact she will be a likely representative for the USA in next year’s Paralympics).  If you’ve ever seen her run in a race you’d notice how she has to compensate her form.  It’s really an incredible thing when you realize what she has to do.  Since she doesn’t have much use of her right arm we have to have her run the second leg (because the #2 and #4 runners use their left arm in the baton pass).  On top of that, about a month ago her right arm became dislocated and she will need to have surgery as soon as the season is over.  Obviously she always has to run with pain and I don’t think any of us know how painful it really is.  Because of her arm many Division I colleges backed off recruiting her.  She never made the state meet in Texas and it was her first time running on the historic University of Texas track.

So Deja heads down the backstretch running well and once we get the baton to Nikki Larch-Miller on the third leg I am feeling very good.  Being our fastest runner, Nikki held off the rest of the field and passed off to her twin sister Taylor who got the baton just ahead of four other teams.  Early in the season I decided to put Taylor on the anchor because she has awesome closing speed and if a race is close at the end she is usually able to pull it out.

For this race Taylor ran the best leg of her life as we ended up placing second in the heat (top-3 advanced automatically).  As we were celebrating in the stands the time flashed up on the scoreboard: 44.30.  We knocked off almost an entire second from our previous best of 45.23.

When all the heat results were tabulated we were fourth overall, only behind Texas A&M, Texas and Oklahoma.  We finished ahead of schools like USC, Oregon, Arizona St, Arizona, UCLA, Kansas, Baylor … the list goes on and on.

Obviously the environment after the race was one of euphoria.  This is why you do sports and eventually want to stay involved in coaching afterwards.  Knowing the struggles we went through and to see how excited those girls were after reaching our goal of advancing to the NCAA Championships was one of the special moments of my career.

One of the other reasons it was so special is for something totally different.  If you read this blog with any regularity you might recall that after this meet last year (in Arkansas) that I had heard my father passed away.  On the ride home last year I wrote a blog that went viral (at least in my world).  So as soon as the celebration of this race was over my first thought was to call my mom and share with her our happiness on a day that both of us were probably heavy hearted.  I told the girls how much I appreciated what they were able to do for me – it was a truly great moment.

What’s next?

Now we have to refocus on the next goal at hand which is trying to score points at the NCAA Championships in Eugene, Oregon.  We’ll take a couple of easy days and then get back into trying to duplicate the performances from Austin.  At this level of track and field, every athlete and every relay team has a chance for success but the margin of error is razor thin.

We are excited for the NCAA Championships and will be heading there full of confidence!

Next blog

I’ll be back after our trip to Oregon to let you all know how it went!

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

MVC Championships - we win one, lose one - NCAA's up next

It was another memorable MVC Championships – both for being euphoric and devastating at the same time.

Win one, lose one

If you don’t know by now we won the women’s MVC title and finished second in the men’s meet.  Here are the scores …

WOMEN:  Wichita St 179, Indiana St 149, Southern Illinois 127, Missouri St 81, Northern Iowa 79, Bradley 61, Drake 54, Illinois St 54, Loyola 27.

MEN:  Southern Illinois 159, Wichita St 143, Northern Iowa 123, Indiana St 117, Loyola 104, Drake 80, Illinois St 76, Bradley 16.

Heading into the meet our men were picked to win and our women were picked second.  If any of this sounds familiar it’s because last year the same thing happened.  Last year I talked about the emotions of winning one meet but losing the other at the same time.  It was just as tough this year – it never gets easy.

Our ladies continue their winning ways

There is something about the MVC Outdoor Championships that our women have seemed to figure out.  We’ve won a lot of titles in women’s track and field, especially during the outdoor season.  The spirit of our ladies team seems to all come together perfectly at the MVC Championships and this year was no different.

Led by the MVC Athlete of the Meet, Nikki Larch-Miller, our ladies took a meet that looked close on paper and ended up pulling away to a substantial win.  We decided not to compete Nikki in the Heptathlon (which she is ranked #10 in the NCAA) and focus on individual events.  So she “only” did the 100m, 200m, 100m hurdles, Long Jump, Javelin and 4x100m relay.  She was ready to run the 4x400m relay if needed but fortunately the meet was over by then.  She totaled 40 points and was, without a doubt, the MVP of our team.

But like all conference championships, it was a team victory.  We had over 20 women score points and our large cheering section kept our ladies focused all weekend long.  On top of the team title our ladies also broke three school records on the final day.  It was a great meet and a satisfying end to the MVC season for our team!

Our men come close – we’ve been here before

For the seventh time in a row, our men finished second at the MVC Championships (including indoor).  If you think that sounds frustrating you should’ve been there for all seven of those meets.  This meet, in particular, was extra frustrating because we felt we had the team to win.

Here’s how it fell apart …

After almost two days of competition it looked like our men were starting to take control.  Ugis Jocis and Kyle Larkin finished 1-2 in a dramatic 3000m steeplechase race for our men to take a projected 20 point lead with the only remaining event of Day 2 being the Long Jump.  And midway through the Long Jump it looked like Southern Illinois was doing well but just a little above projected.  Then all of a sudden the skies got dark, the wind started blowing and SIU’s long jumpers started jumping out of their minds!  They moved up from the middle of the pack to go 1-3-5, mostly on their final jumps, to make a 21 point swing against the formchart in their favor.  Our projected lead heading into the final day was gone in an instant.

On Saturday night we had our usual team meeting to let the team in on how the scores looked and we all felt optimistic that we could overtake SIU on Sunday.  Unfortunately the first event on Sunday, the Pole Vault, proved to be a killer.  Just like the Long Jump the night before, SIU’s Vaulters got fired up and went 1-2-4-8 while we failed to score any points and an even meet suddenly became a 20 point deficit.

Our men hung in the rest of the day and cut into that lead little by little but we never had the big point swing that was needed to win.  It was a tough way to lose the meet.  Our men have gone through a ton of adversity this year and they were ready to win this one.

All credit goes to SIU who performed very inspired.  It was their first MVC Outdoor title since 1992.

What’s next?

We’ll give our kids a few days off to recover from the weekend and on Thursday we’ll find out who is qualified for the First Round of the NCAA Championships.  We will have at least 18 athletes qualified for sure and hopefully a few more will get in when the fields are announced.  20 is always a good number for our team.

To qualify you have to be in the top 48 of the western half of the country in your event.  It goes by declarations so athletes below the top 48 can get in if an athlete doesn’t declare for their event.  For example Nikki Larch-Miller won’t run all the events she is qualified for and so the next person gets moved up.  We could get as many as six more athletes in that way.

We’ll leave for Austin, Texas, on Tuesday next week for the meet on Thur/Fri/Sat.  The top 12 from Austin in each event will go on to the NCAA Finals two weeks later in Eugene, Oregon.  We have several athletes that have a good chance but getting through the NCAA West prelims is never easy.

Next blog

I’ll be back after our trip to Texas to let you all know how it went!

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

KU and Shocker Open recap and it's MVC Championship week!

We’re one week away from the MVC Outdoor Championships!  It’s been two weeks since I wrote a blog so there is much to review! 

Sunflower State rivalry recap

Two weeks ago we went up to Lawrence, Kansas, to compete against our in-state rivals KU and Kansas State (along with Air Force, Oral Roberts and UMKC).  We won the meet on the men’s side and were defeated by KU on the women.  K-State was a late addition to the meet and didn’t enter athletes in a way to maximize their scoring potential.

We have a strong men’s team this year and that was evident in Lawrence.  In just about every event we seem to have scoring potential as well as several upper level athletes that can make a run at the NCAA Championships in a few weeks.  Our women got beat pretty handily, and while we weren’t happy about that we still like our team and our chances at the upcoming MVC Championships.

We always want to defeat our Division I in-state opponents Kansas and Kansas State, and we have done just that several times in the past couple of years.  Slowly but surely Wichita State is gaining a more significant reputation in the world of track and field and each time we take down the Jayhawks or Wildcats it adds to the public perception of how good we are and continue to be.  The people that know about track and field really appreciate what we have built in Wichita and the level of recruits we land each year show that we are here to stay.

Shocker Open recap

For the first time ever we hosted a small “tune-up” meet the week before the MVC Championships.  Usually we go to K-State or Arkansas for this meet but after going to K-State last year and being pretty much the only team with athletes there we decided we might as well host the meet this year.

And it went very well!  Competing at home is something that helps most of our kids and we saw more than the normal amount of good performances in a low-key meet like this.  I think it was the perfect way to accomplish the goal of getting in some good competition and not traveling the week before heading to Illinois.

Picking the MVC team

In previous blogs I’ve gone into detail about we go about picking our 32 man and 32 woman rosters for the MVC Championships so I won’t rehash that again but I will mention how difficult it remains for us to accomplish it without a major struggle.

If you don’t follow our team on a regular basis one thing that defines us is how deep we are.  When we show up at a meet you know you will see Shockers in every event on the track and in the field competing hard.  We have a roster of 60-70 athletes for each the men and women so getting it down to the top 32 is very tough.

Heading into yesterday’s Shocker Open, we had about 40 athletes we were considering for those 32 spots and some of the athletes towards the bottom of the list had great days and put themselves into positions that made us rethink where they stood.  That’s exactly what we wanted to happen.  We want it to be as tough as possible to make this team because we know that the 32 athletes that will head to Illinois State next week will be ready to contribute to our goal of winning the Valley title.

Our coaching staff has a group text that we constantly use to message each other about various things in our program.  Today I woke up to several messages including ones from Coach Rainbolt from 3am where he was up all night analyzing our team and how the MVC stacks up.  Coach Bolt is passionate about our teams winning the title and waking up to a stream of messages between our coaches for something like that is very cool indeed.  Being a track coach isn’t a normal occupation and we are very fortunate to be able to get paid to do what we do.  While some people might think pouring through meet results to determine how to pick our team seems tedious, I tend to think it’s awesome.  I have no problem spending my “off” days doing just that.

With that being said, we have not made our final decisions yet and will probably go through the rest of the weekend discussing the final spots.  We know how close these meets can be and picking the right person who might score one extra point can be the difference in winning or losing a championship next Sunday.

How does the MVC look?

 

Once again the MVC looks like a dogfight between several teams and it appears we will be in the hunt on both sides.  Our men probably have a slightly better shot at winning than our women but we could easily win or lose either championship.

On the men’s side the closest competitor on paper looks to be Southern Illinois but we know that Indiana State has won a lot of titles and will have to be dealt with.  Loyola also has a strong senior laden team and will do some serious damage in several events.  I imagine those three teams along with Wichita State will distance themselves from the field and battle it out on Sunday for the title.  As I mentioned earlier our men are deep and talented across the board and scoring in all 21 events is very possible.  If we’re able to do that I like our chances of winning the title.  The last time the MVC Championship was at Illinois State in 2010 our men set an all-time MVC scoring record of 224 points in winning the title.  Let’s hope history is about to repeat itself!

The women’s meet looks like a three-way battle with our old rivals Indiana State and Southern Illinois.  Just like during the indoor season when we finished third and just a few points from winning the title, this meet appears to be coming down to the final events for all three teams.  Indiana State has made a late season surge to really look tough while Southern Illinois has been consistent all outdoor season.  We will be coming to the meet with some heavy hitters in a few events and for us to win the title our top girls will need to be ready to perform as well as the bottom half of our roster needing to pick up some “move-up” points for us to come out on top.

It should be an exciting three days of competition!  Make sure to follow along on Goshockers.com as well as our social media pages to keep up to date on this fun and entertaining meet!

Recruiting

While the outward appearance of focus would seem to be on our current team, our recruiting efforts to build our future team have been intense as well.  We’ve signed several good athletes in recent weeks and will continue as the spring winds down.  In fact we have four recruits coming in this week before we head off Wednesday to the MVC meet.

Once the season ends in July I’m planning on doing some blogs devoted solely to recruiting but for now just know our staff is getting after it and beating the bushes to continue to have the best team representing Wichita State we can.

Movie update

It’s been so busy that I haven’t had the chance to do much movie watching but I did see a movie that I want to recommend everyone to check out.  It’s called Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father.  It’s a documentary made by a guy whose friend was murdered and this movie is to tell his infant son about his dad.  That is all I want to reveal about this movie and I encourage you to find it and watch it without trying to read anything more about it.  I promise that by the end of the movie you will be glad you did.  Most movies don’t have much of a profound effect on me afterwards but this one did.  Check it out!

Next week

Well I’m sure a recap of the MVC Championships will dominate this area next week as well as looking forward to the first round of the NCAA Championships two weeks later in Austin, Texas.

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

A different kind of week, Sunflower St rivalry renewed and MVC preview

 A different kind of week

For a track coach you get used to a routine even though every week is a little different.  Practice Monday through Thursday or Friday then compete on the weekend, throw in some recruiting on random days and rest on Sunday and do it all over again for 6 months or so from January until June.

Last week was a little different as we had a meet on Wednesday and (gasp!) we had a weekend off!

Emporia State Midweek

For the last few years we’ve decided to take a weekend off and make the short trip to Emporia for a low-key Wednesday night meet, mostly for kids who didn’t go out to Sacramento earlier in the outdoor season.  Being one of the only D1 teams at the meet, many of our “developing” kids get to run to the front and gain some confidence from winning races and working on things they don’t get to do at more high profile meets.  I’ve seen some struggling kids turn around their seasons at the Emporia Midweek and end up being significant contributors a few weeks later at the MVC Championships.

What do track coaches do with an off weekend?

I will admit, the thought of an off weekend sounded really nice last week.  I’ve been hitting it hard for several weeks with tough travel and meet hosting.  So what did I do?  Mostly play golf.

In fact, not that anybody cares, but I shot a very pleasing 78 Saturday.  I won’t talk much about the 95 I shot on Sunday but all in all it was a relaxing weekend and got me rejuvenated and ready for the final weeks of the outdoor season.

Sunflower State rivalry renewed!

We are heading to Lawrence Saturday to take on the Jayhawks.  A late addition to the meet this week is Kansas State (they were going to host a meet but cancelled it and are now coming over).  Besides our Kansas rivals, we will also compete against Air Force, Oral Roberts and UMKC.  It should be a great scored meet – one that we are trying to win.

Last year we had a similar meet at K-St with KU and Air Force that we swept on both sides.  Indoor we had a Kansas Triangular where K-St won and we beat KU.

A meet like this gets our kids a little more fired up and ready to compete as we like to show we don’t take a back seat to our in-state rivals.  For anyone that lives in Kansas and likes track you should make sure to get to Lawrence Saturday for a great meet!

How does the MVC look?

With less than three weeks until the MVC Outdoor Championships at Illinois State, the race for the trophies are becoming a little clearer.  And the good news is Wichita State should be in the hunt for both titles.

On the women’s side it once again looks like a three-way battle with Indiana State and Southern Illinois.  This weekend will be a big indicator for us in terms of who will make our conference team and how ready we are.  I think we’re looking good and our ladies have a deep and powerful team that the other squads will need to be ready for.  Indiana State and Southern Illinois have great athletes and coaches too and I’m sure they’ll be ready for the challenge.  It should be fun!

For the men we also appear to be a slight favorite on paper with SIU, Indiana State and Loyola chasing us.  We have a couple injuries on the men’s side but I feel like we are coming around now and look hungry to get our first men’s title since 2010.  The MVC is a really tough league and winning championships aren’t easy.  Those teams will throw their best at us and we will need to be ready!

Next week

Hopefully I’ll be back to recap a great meet at KU as well as getting ready to host our final home meet of the year the following week, the Shocker Open.  Maybe I’ll even chat about a couple new movies I’ve seen recently as well!

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

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

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

KT Woodman Classic/Shocker Pre-State

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

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

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

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

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

On to Ooooooooooklahoma

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

Here were the final team scores:

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

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

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

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

Being a sports psychologist

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

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

Recruiting

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

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

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

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

Next week

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

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

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

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

California

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A big problem with our sport

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

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

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

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

Shocker Pre-State Challenge/KT Woodman Classic

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

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

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

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

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

Next week

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

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