By Bill Lawson
Head Coach
We are coming off of a split week where we sent a pretty large contingency over to Notre Dame. We had some pretty good marks by some of our athletes there, and one in particular was William Barnes.
Will was very consistent with three races under eight seconds and hitting a lifetime PR to take over the Mid-American Conference lead in the 60m hurdles at 7.87. The consistency he is showing tells me he is ready to hit a big one. He is a sophomore and he is really starting to mature and grow up in these big competitions. Our conference is very strong right now, and every time someone in the MAC has stepped up and gone by him, he has answered the call.
Our true freshman Riak Reese had a fantastic weekend with two lifetime PR’s at 6.79 and 21.33. Those are two fantastic performances by a young man who is really performing beyond our expectations as a true freshman. He was very highly touted coming out of high school and he was a bronze medalist in the Pan-Am Juniors this summer, but he is by far exceeding his last year’s indoors coming out of high school. We are very pleased with that.
It was good to see Roseanne Erickson move forward and get on the long jump lead. Dior Delphont got her long jump off, so like last year the girls are sitting one. two three in the Mid-American Conference.
We have also some of our mid-distance people starting to move forward. Marteze Roper is a senior who is finally starting to feel better and had a 1:52 low run. Jacob Swords had some issues over the holidays when he was very, very ill. He has fought back from that and his times are starting to drop as well.
On the ladies side, Hanna Fleck is finally back in the sub-five. I think she ran a 4:56 that was half a second off of her lifetime PR. True freshman Lauren Burnett has been struggling a little bit, but she finally went south on her 800 and got it down to 2:12. Our women’s 400 runners ran better, but we still have to improve there and have two weekends to do it.
All in all we had some pretty good events. Our distance runners all ran better.
The conference is really tough this year. It is going to be a real dog fight on both the women’s and the men’s side Feb. 28-March 1 here at the Kent State Field House.
One of the reasons we split this weekend is I took the pole vaulters and the combined-event people over to Akron where they have a good vault runway. That was an opportunity for Tyler Jones to get his first multi in as well as Audra Puckrin. Notre Dame doesn’t host a multi so we needed to split up, and that worked out well. Tyler Jones was very close to his lifetime PR. The really big performance was Jesse Oxley jumping 17’3.00” (5.36m) which I believe is a school record. He looked very good doing it. He went head-to-head with the Akron vaulters, and they have the best vaulters in the conference with one ranked second in the nation.
In the MAC, between all of the teams, we have a lot of top-five kids at the NCAA Championships. The MAC is very, very strong on both the men’s and women’s sides, and we’ll have great representation at the NCAA Championships in Albuquerque, N.M. March 14-15.
While we had some good performances, the truth of the matter is that the rest of the conference is getting better, too. It is going to come down to will and determination. We have Purdue this weekend coming up and the tune-up the following weekend, and then we have the battle with everyone coming to town.
I’m hoping being at home for the MAC Championships gives us a little bit of a boost. It is usually a 10-point or more advantage to be at home because you are familiar with your own facilities, you don’t have to travel and you sleep in your own bed. We are going to have a lot of fan support. We expecting huge crowds, so it should be a lot of fun.
No comments:
Post a Comment