Previewing the MAC Indoor Track & Field Championships

By Bill Lawson

Head Coach

The MAC Indoor Championships are coming up this weekend at the Kent State Field House where there will be some really intriguing match ups.

On the women’s side, there will be some key matchups in order for our women’s team to be able to successfully defend its conference title. Dior Delophont was the MVP of last year’s championships where she won all three titles in the long jump, triple jump and high jump. Can she defend those titles? That’s a key point for us.

With Ann Marie Duffus the favorite in the hurdle after finishing runner up to a girl from Eastern Michigan last year, can she win when she has additional duties after this past weekend in the 60-meter dash, and then of course she is one of the favorites in the long jump. 

The women’s shot putters went one-two-three last year, which has never been done before in the MAC where we have very good throwers. Can we do that again. The girl who could break that up is Alexis Cooks from the University of Akron.

There are going to be some key races that aren’t even for the title, like Roseanne Erickson in the 200 and the triple jump. She is sitting in seventh place in the triple jump, but she could end up third.

This one will come late in the day on the women’s side. Freshman Weronika Gaudyn of Akron will have a key matchup in the triple jump late in the meet with Dior, who was fifth in the nation last year. Weronika Gaudyn is sitting ahead of Dior right now. Dior has had only one opportunity this year, but she is poised and ready to go.

On the men’s side, with Kent State, Akron, Eastern Michigan and a greatly improved Buffalo team, there are going to be so many key matchups. But I think the best race on the track will be the 60-meter hurdles where sophomore Will Barnes will go against a senior from Central Michigan. Two hundredths of a second separate them. They are both unbeaten and this will be the first time they meet. The 60-meter hurdles is a key race for the men. We have the ability to score three in that race.

The Kent State Field Hosue

Also on the track will be the dynamic the dynamic dual in the 60 with Wayne Gordon and Riak Reese vs. two great runners from Akron. And then there is the trio of Gordon, Reese and Will Barnes sitting 1-2-4 in the 200 late in the day vs. Buffalo and Eastern Michigan runners. That will be very significant.

A hot field event will be the men’s triple jump. Kent State, Akron, Eastern Michigan and Buffalo all have significant players in that group. They are interchangeable. You can jump great and end up sixth or seventh, or you can jump great and end up first. It is that close.

The men’s 400 is the deepest we’ve seen in the conference. 

There are six or seven things we need to happen in this meet for the men to be successful. Sometimes it all comes down to hundredths of a second meaning the difference between first and fourth. You are talking about that in a scoring system that goes 10-8-6-4-2-1 on the men’s side. It will be a matter of inches and hundredths and tenths of a second making three, four and five-point swings per event.

Someone may argue this from another conference, but our top three men’s teams would do well in the ACC, Big Ten, Pac 12, and we would not embarrass ourselves in the SEC. We have high-end kids who would be top-three performers in a number of events.

More than the women’s side, every event will be key on the men’s side in determining the champion.

The women’s side sill also be a dogfight with Kent State, Akron and Eastern Michigan.

And on both sides there are going to be teams who play a huge role in helping another team win or being a spoiler when they have a kid who comes out of nowhere and knocks one of your kids off in an event where you were hoping to get points. That can happen to everyone. Everyone in the conference has athletes who will do well in an event to upset the apple cart on the top end.

We are really excited to get going this weekend. It will be interesting. All we can do is control what we do. If we win, it will be great. If we are in third or fourth place and we competed our best, I am going to be proud of our teams.

One last "Tune Up" before the MAC Indoor Championships

By Bill Lawson

Head Coach

Purdue was a good experience and a good team environment. Going against Purdue and a few other Division I teams, I thought it created a good atmosphere. It obviously wasn’t the same as a conference atmosphere, but it was kind of similar.

I liked that we rallied as a team and had a lot of team energy. Those are things we will need in two weeks when we host the Mid-American Conference Indoor Championships.

We had a lot of different athletes move forward or at least stay consistent. It’s always huge in track and field to go through a weekend and have no injuries. A lot of times the healthiest team is the most successful team at the conference championships.

We have a couple of minor injuries that are on the mend. We don’t have anything that is so severe that we are overly concerned. Everybody should be hitting on all eight cylinders come the MAC Championships.

We have a couple of kids down, but they are very much on the mend. We rested Dior Delophont. We rested Cody Jones. We rested Cory Miller. Those are all people we expect to go out and score points at the MAC Championships. 

This week we have our Kent Stat Tune Up. It is exactly what the name of the meet suggests. It is preparation for next week’s championships. A lot of our kids will have a much lighter load. Some will completely rest. Some of our better kids may due just one event to stay sharp. There are a number of kids who need to race again to insure they are in the fast heats and to get their qualifying status going into the MAC Championships. 

It is a week to tune up skills to be ready to go. I don’t know anyone who will be doing any triples or heavy doubles. There is the potential for someone running a single event coming back in a relay. I haven’t talked to our sprint coach yet, but we could rest the relays this weekend.

This week is also an opportunity for our vaulters and throwers to get one more good mark in.

This will be a large meet with a lot of teams in from all divisions. It’s an opportunity for our kids to rest of move forward.

Probably the biggest thing about the weekend is Matthias Tayala hasn’t thrown for four weeks. He’ll be back in action this weekend. We have just been getting him ready after an injury over the holidays. Coach Nathan Fanger has done a great job, as has our training staff, and now we are looking forward to seeing what Matthias can do this weekend.

Teams continue to build momentum towards MAC Championships

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.

Men and Women continue to get stronger with eye towards hosting MAC Championships

By Bill Lawson
Head coach

(From Jan. 29)

Two weeks ago we held the Akron Duals here at Kent State and we had some pretty strong performances. Obviously our women’s team did a great job. Our men also had a strong performance even with a few guys who had been out making their way back. It was a good weekend for us.

Going to Indiana this past weekend for the Gladstein Invitational was also great for us. We had several athletes really move forward. I was extremely happy with Mike King, who had several PR’s this past week and also finished second in the shot put.

Our horizontal jumps are getting better. Jailyn Twitty and Donovan Tolbert had lifetime PR’s in the triple jump. And then Dylan Shirley had a breakthrough performance winning the long jump at at 7.14m, which is a lifetime PR.

We had great performances from Wayne Gordon in both the 60 and the 200. He has one of the top 200-meter times in the country. Freshman Riak Reese had a great day, too. 

Of course, Will Barnes added a lifetime PR with a great performance and was named the Mid-American Conference’s Track Athlete of the Week after finishing second in the 60-meter hurdles. That lifetime PR was a 7.93 which is fourth best in the Kent State record books and the second best time in the MAC and 28th in the nation this season.

We have a lot of kids making moves in the right direction on the men’s side. You add Miles Dunlap, who took the conference lead in the 400 two weeks ago at the Akron Dual. Overall, I’m really excited about the men’s side and the possibilities of having a great championship performance when we host the Mid-American Conference Championship at the Field House Feb. 28-March 1.

The men’s team looks to be very strong moving forward. Our relays are strong, our sprints are good, our throws are good. I think the guys are doing a very good job.

And things are exciting on the women’s side as well where you have student-athletes like Dior Delophont, who has the second best high jump in the nation and leads the MAC in both the high jump and the triple jump. Dior took first in the triple jump with a jump of 41' 6.03" at Indiana. The week before, she claimed victory in the high jump and triple jump, winning the first with a 6-00.50 effort and the latter with a 40-06.25. 

Joh’Vonnie Mosley is one of the top 10 shot putters in the country, ranked in the top five now nationally with a 54-7 throw that is second best all time at Kent State.

Our women’s throwing has been fantastic with Mosley, Danniel Thomas and Jackie Leppelmeier. They are doing a great job.

Roseanne Erickson is having a fantastic season in the long jump and the sprints, and Ann Marie Duffus is doing a great job in the hurdles and the long jump.

Add it all together and I think the overall strength of the women’s team is in good position to repeat and defend its championship title.

It’s exciting. The men are much improved and the women are still strong. We have several meets ahead of us to keep getting better and then we are very excited to host the MAC Championships.

This is going to be an off week (Jan. 31-Feb. 1) for several of our student-athletes. We will take a limited roster to the Findlay Open. That is an elite throwing meet so coach Fangler will be taking the bulk of the kids and we’ll have a couple of other athletes go who live in the region. But overall it will be a very small group.

For the rest, this will be a weekend where we train through. We’ll heal up some nagging injuries and get a couple of extra training days. We’ll get in three hard workouts and get ready for the next weekend when we will send the majority of our athletes to the Meyo Invitational at Notre Dame (Feb. 7-8).

Back to work after the holidays and looking ahead to the Doug Raymond Invitational

By Bill Lawson

Head Coach

We are excited to have everyone back. Practice got underway on Tuesday with the bulk of the back. 

It is always concerning to see the fitness level after a break like this because when they left they were in really good shape.

We will use the Doug Raymond Invitational this weekend at the Kent State Field House as kind of a tune up for next weekend. One week from Friday on Jan. 17 at 6 p.m. we will host the Akron Dual at the Field House. Really in my mind that is what kicks off indoor season, even though we’ll have two meets in preparation.

We’ll take a look at some of our higher level individuals, and if they are not completely for this weekend we will train through the weekend so that we don’t lose a training day, and we’ll get them ready for the Akron Duals. That will get some of the younger kids going.

It is exciting to get to see where we are as a team. Truthfully, by the time we get to the Mayo Invitational at Notre Dame on Feb. 7, that will really be the indicator of where the strength of our team is.

The difficulty over the last few weeks is the training environments our kids had. Some of our local kids were able to come back and work out on their own at the Field House. We had a number of kids who live near Youngstown working over at the Youngstown facility. But with the cold weather we’ve had, some of our distance kids have had to put on a lot of warm clothes and just go out. That’s been tough. That’s where some of the west coast and southern kids have an advantage, but they have it in all sports. 

We make the best of it. We are lucky to have a great indoor facility to train in. Hopefully when we get an indicator of where we are this weekend we won’t have fallen off too far from where we were when we ran the Golden Flash Gala back in December. I think we will be right back where we are, and then things are always hyped up a little bit with the Akron Dual. 

I am excited to see some of our middle distance and distance kids get going this weekend because they had limited action at the Golden Flash Gala. Those are the ones, you can really count on training over the holiday. The 800, the miler and two miler, I’m looking forward to seeing where they will be, not just this weekend, but even more next weekend at the Akron Dual.

We are excited to get the season going, and we are excited about hosting the MAC Championships here on Feb. 28. That’s not very far off. 

By Bill Lawson

Director of Track & Field and Cross Country

It was really nice to get back into competition with the Golden Flashes Gala this past weekend.

We started training in September and there is a lot of hard work, energy and effort that goes into it.

It was also important for our kids and the coaching staff to see where we are in this pre-holiday time. We got a checkpoint to see where everyone is.

There were some outstanding performances over the weekend, especially on day one. It started off in the women’s 20-pound weight throw where Jackie Leppelmeier had a lifetime PR at 67-2. That is right on the edge of saying she has punched her ticket to the national championships. We can’t say for sure, but it is pretty close, and that has very excited.

On the men’s side we had two very good performances that stood out on day one. Redshirt freshman Reggie Jagers threw 59-feet in his first weight-throw competition ever for Kent State. He did a great job and will be in the mix at the conference meet for us. 

The big performance of the entire day and really the entire weekend was Matthias Tayala throwing 72-2. It was one of the best series I’ve ever seen. He had four or five throws over his lifetime PR and without a doubt he has punched his ticket to the national championship. I believe that is the No. 1 or 2 throw in the nation to this point. The significance of that throw is he beat a school record that was 40 years old by an Olympian in Jacques Accambray (71-10 3/4). It was poetry to watch Matthias throw and to see how much he has matured. Coach Nathan Fangler has done so many great things with that throws group. It is impressive to see.

Matthias doing this so early in the season will allow him to go back to training and not have to worry about chasing performances. Now his only worry is to peak at the national championships. He’ll probably focus a little on the shot put and go back to some hammer throwing. He probably won’t touch the weight again until the second week in January. It might not be until the Akron Dual on Jan. 17. That cuts down on wear and tear because the weight throw is a little bit of an abusive event. It’s a lot like the triple jump where you don’t want to triple jump too many weekends. That 35-pound weight spinning four times in the ring and with all of that energy at the end of the ball can be a little bit daunting.

We had some other great performances, too. We were very happy to see Andrew Goodwin get a win in the 5,000 on Friday night. That was pretty much where we thought he would be coming off of the cross country season. We also had Steve Fischer back after an illness during the cross country season. He ran very well at 15-flat. That’s going to be good for us in the future.

Our long jump was okay. We didn’t have great performances, but we were solid. Dylan Shirley had a victory that backed up his intrasquad meet from a few weeks earlier. 

We didn’t compete a lot of our women’s long jumpers. In fact, on the women’s side, I estimate that we had over 80 MAC points sitting down from the year before who did not compete. Either they competed well at the intrasquad meet, or like Matthias, we were estimating that people like Dior Delophont, Roseanne Erickson, Ann Marie Duffus, Danniel Thomas, and Joh’vonnie Mosley may all punch their tickets to the national championship by the end of the season. To conserve how many opportunities they actually compete will make them better towards the conference run that will be held here at Kent State Feb. 28-March 1, and then on into the NCAA championships.

I predicted the kids who saw the performances on the first day would get excited and that we would have a really outstanding second day. That is exactly what happened, and in particular with true freshman Matt Tobin winning the 400 meters. He had a lifetime PR indoors and he looked good doing it. That bodes well for the future for him. We didn’t have our top 400-meter runner that day in Laron Brown, who ran the 60 for a little speed work and then came back for the 4x400.

One of the two of the biggest performances on the track was Will Barnes winning the 60 hurdles and breaking eight seconds for the first time in his career at 7.98. He backed it up with another lifetime PR in the 200 meters going 21.8. That’s the first time he has been under 22 seconds. 

The other really big performance was the double win by Wayne “Flash” Gordon in the 60m dash (6.85) and 200m dash (21.39), which was an indoor lifetime PR. All of our legs were tired because we are training heavy and we maxed out in the weight room this week. So to go out and do that was very impressive.

Unfortunately, one of our other top-recruit sprinters, Riak Reese, had a false start in the 60. He had looked really good in the intrasquad. But he backed it up with a lifetime PR in the 200 with 21.69. 

That’s going to be fun to watch those guys compete. You add in Nate Scales and that’s a group of three really solid sprinters.

I’m very happy with vaulters Cory Miller and Jesse Oxley, who went one-two and jumped 16-1 from short-approach runs. We are not back to our full approach yet. I think they are going to make a better contribution than we’ve had in the past, and we are going to need that for our conference run.

Even though our women’s 4x400 was second to Pitt this weekend, they ran almost five seconds faster on Saturday than they did a year ago in this meet, and they ended up being the MAC champions. I think that’s a very good sign of the fitness for our women’s 4x400 team. 

I was also very happy to see Lynnese Beyan’s win in the 400 and Olivia Hallstein’s win in the 200, and the one-two finish

Coach Phil Ricaby is doing a great job with the triple jumpers. They had far better performance than a year ago with Donovan Tolbert and Jailyn Twitty, they jumped very well from short approach with Tolbert winning 47-08 and Twitty second at 47-05 1/4. We are very excited about what those guys are going to be.

We’ll have a true snapshot of where our entire team is at the Akron Dual on Jan. 17.  We should have everyone ready to go by then, and that will give us a look into the future of where we will be for the MAC meet.

We are about to go into winter break, and the big fear is always that this is the most important time for kids to maintain their fitness level. Some people have the ability to come back here to maintain while others have to rely on their hometown facilities. Because of weather it can be a struggle, so they do the best they can. We can’t hold regular practice, so it is up to the student-athlete to maintain his or her fitness.

The kids will come back early on the Monday or Tuesday just after the start of the new year. We open with the Doug Raymond Invitational on Jan. 11 at 10 a.m. right here at the Kent State Field House. 

Join us for our Intrasquad Meet

By Bill Lawson
Director of Track & Field and Cross Country

I would like to invite anyone that is interested to our intrasquad meet that will be hosted here at Kent State in the field house on Monday night starting at 8:00pm.

It will be blue versus gold and it will be very exciting.  We just had our mock draft last night and the teams are picked.  It should be an interesting battle between the coaching staff and the teams that they picked.  The gold team is myself, Coach Fanger and Coach Croghan versus the young coaches, Coach Rickaby, Coach Bastron and Coach Schober of the blue team.

Come out and support the track and field teams and see the Golden Flashes’ first action.