MAAC attack

First of all, thanks to all alums and others that have expressed concern about my son's condition. He has a severe case of the flu, along with other related viruses, that have knocked him down bigtime. He is slowly recovering but still remains weak. We're working to get him back to full health soon enough. It'll be a long, slow process but I feel we are going in the right direction. Next year? We will vaccinate, no doubt! Thanks again.

He was released from the hospital on Thursday afternoon. I was unsure as to whether I would go to the MAAC meet at the Armory. We decided the best course of action would be to drive down in the event I needed to rush home for any reason. Didn't want to be stranded in NYC for hours waiting for a bus departure. Fortunately, all was quiet on the homefront, but I was checking my cell phone for texts and messages every few minutes throughout the night. Suffice to say my mind was not 100 percent into the meet.

As for the meet ... it was one of our better MAAC meets in quite a while. I still have not located complete results online and still have to do some research (it was a late-night drive home, and I'm still groggy from the week in general), but we scored a lot more points than usual at this meet. While a lot of the points were in distance races -- and our guys did phenomenal there -- we also generated some fantastic points in the 400, pole vault and the very exciting 4x400 that we almost won! And of course, our favorite steeplechaser Greg "Rickey" Masto getting his vital points in the high jump!

We barely avoided last place, but we also were within striking distance of Iona for third place. Overall, not bad.

Freshman Adam Vess was the big highlight in that he won the mile in a school-record time of 4:08, despite the fact that the first lap was in a pedestrian 35 seconds. In fact, his last 1200 meters were sizzled in a remarkable 3:01-3:02 range. Vess, being Vess, was pissed off at the slow first lap. He shook his head, looked at me and muttered "screw this" (actually, the first word was not "screw") and took off like a shot. He went wire-to-wire, which is never an easy thing, and finished ahead of a pretty solid field.

I will try to highlight more in future posts, as well as post the splits -- although, as usual with wacky MAAC races the splits are a bit uneven!

Thanks to the excellent alumni support: Hopkins, Schab, Decker, Quinn, Bamberger. If others were there that I am forgetting, sorry. You can vilify me in the comments.

We'll be back at the Armory one last time next Friday for the NYU meet.