The residue of design

In my last post, I quoted a historical baseball figure. Today, I quote another: Branch Rickey. Rickey was widely considered the most astute baseball mind of his time – perhaps of history. Among his many accomplishments, he is probably best known for being the driving force in breaking the color barrier in Major League Baseball with Jackie Robinson joining the Dodgers.

One of Rickey’s most famous quotes goes like this: “Luck is the residue of design.” I love this quote. Loosely translated, it can be taken as: “You make your own luck.” It’s a great philosophy with more than a grain of truth to it.

In comes to mind as I continue to fester over our dual, last-place finishes at indoor MAACs.

One of the things I have thought about repeatedly – and not just recently, but in the past few seasons – is how our “luck has run out” in terms of having really, true quality track and field athletes (not pure distance runners) on both our men’s and women’s squads.

I literally cried when the DeMarco/Quinn/Bamberger era graduated three years ago, as those guys (and others) were the best true track talents this program probably has ever seen. But prior to that, our men’s programs had been blessed with some amazing field event guys that we more or less lucked into getting. Eli Bisnett-Cobb, perhaps the most well-rounded track athlete in our program’s history, literally showed up at freshman orientation, contacted me and asked me for a spot on the team. A few school records, MAAC individual titles and IC4A qualifiers later, I was sure glad he did.

On the women’s side, we have had numerous athletes like that – mostly the doing of then-assistant coach Chuck Williams’ aggressive and successful recruiting efforts in the non-distance area. Chrissy McDevitt and Jen McNamara are two recent examples that instantly pop into my head. So for many years, Phil and I unwittingly had pretty good track and field teams, while we continued to focus our recruiting and coaching efforts predominantly on the distance events.

The past several years, our luck has run out. But again: Luck is a residue of design. If you fashion yourself as a top-notch distance program and focus your effort on that, that’s what you’ll get. That’s what we’ve got. With another top-notch distance program (Iona) in our league that is better than us in that area, you get what you get in the team standings; it might not be pretty. Again, this is not an excuse for a last-place finish. Rather, it might be considered the unfortunate residue of our design.

Here’s the thing: Even if we changed our “model” so to speak, and started aggressively pursuing non-distance track and field athletes, I’m not sure how much better we would be. Our lack of on-campus facilities definitely would hamper our efforts (Side Note: I am never one to complain about our lack of a track and I do not do so here; I’ve always said, “No Track, No Problem,” and I stick by that philosophy). Additionally, especially on the men’s side, our relative lack of scholarship money would probably make it foolhardy to try and spread the athletic aid dollars over an entire track and field team. So, we don’t, and we hope like heck that we can get the next generation of Eli Bisnett-Cobbs, Adam Waterburys, Brian DeMarcos -- and yes, even crazy Denis McManuses -- to come and be part of the Marist Track Family.

But until that time, unfortunately for now our residue of design has just about run out of luck.