By Bill Lawson
Head Coach
We had an amazing weekend at the Tennessee Relays.
As I wrote last week, we were hoping for good weather and we got it. It was 75 degrees on Friday and 80 on Saturday, which was a day of ideal track conditions.
We got a lot of things done with some fantastic performances. Some kids who hadn’t been running well ran well. We had two championship relays in the men’s 4x800 with some good legs from guys who needed to run well, and then in the 4x100 ran well.
We had multiple individual championships. Danniel Thomas won the shot put and the discus with Joh’Vonnie Mosley just a centimeter or two behind. Dior Delophont won the high jump. Ann Marie Duffus winning the hurdles. Roseanne Erickson was second in the 100 meters. Roseanne Erickson breaking the school record in the long jump and finishing second overall. It was a fantastic weekend.
Jailyn Twitty getting over 15-meters for first time in career. I was really pleased with men’s 4x400 getting 3rd overall and breaking the school record with good efforts across the board. Some of our middle-level kids had good performances that might not have been winning mark, but good performances. Mike King had two lifetime PR’s in both shot and discus.
I think we probably moved ahead as a program at least two weekends just from getting good weather. Now we are going to get lucky again because we are supposed to get temperatures in the low-to-mid 60’s and mostly sunny at the Jesse Owens, and that meet is usually 40 and cold.
After that we go off to the prestigious 150th running of the Drake Relays while coach Mark Croghan takes a good group of his middle distance and distance runners to Hillsdale. We’ll split up that weekend.
The great weekend at the Tennessee Relays will give us the ability to have some options and choices with what we want to do with kids the next two weekends instead of having to run in key areas to move forward to get on the conference list and be in position to do well at the MAC Championships.
We feel more in control of our destiny than we did at this time in our indoor season.
Our men’s team looks really good, and our women’s team doesn’t look bad by any means. I don’t think we have used all of our power yet in the women’s team, and we have a little bit left on the men’s side, too.
Tennessee allowed us to see our team in full and that gives us a better barometer of what we need to do this next month to be prepared for the MAC championships at Ohio University.
We look really good right now on the regional and even the national level on both sides. I think we could take our largest number of kids to the national championships probably in the history of Kent State and certainly since I have been here.
We could take as many as 14 and I think for sure we can take eight. Since I’ve been here, the most we have taken is seven. That’s pretty exciting.
I like where we are right now in just week four of the outdoor season, and we’ve had only had one weekend of good weather in which to compete. I think it gave us hope, confirmation and realization. Hope for some people, confirmation for others, and the realization that it is going to happen.
This week at Jesse Owens, we want to avoid going backwards. Weather permitting we will make some tiny movements forward in middle distance and distance. I want to get those relay sticks around without incident. We don’t want to be foolish and try to do too much coming off of the huge week in Tennessee because we have a quick turnaround. I leave on Tuesday with the decathletes. They compete Wednesday and Thursday at the Drake Relays. The rest of the team flies in Thursday and competes Friday and Saturday before coming home Sunday.
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