More on the Yale meet

As promised, here are some more random notes and commentary on Saturday’s season-opening track meet at Yale.

Men’s meet:

Weight a minute!: Hey! Whaddya know? We have a Weight Thrower! That’s right. Freshman Sean Ellman, a local kid from Arlington HS, threw the 35-pound weight for the first time on Saturday. And, when I say “first time,” I really mean “first time.”

We ordered Sean a new 35-pound implement from MF Athletics a few weeks ago. It sat in its shipping box in my hopelessly cluttered office. Until Saturday. Sean brought the box, opened it up, and threw it at the meet. Note: Practicing such an event at the McCann Center is not an easy task. But we have some potential solutions!

Anyway, Sean did well. He has a pretty good one-turn throw in the circle. We will need to get that up to at least two turns. Marist alum, school record holder and loyal blog follower Peter VanAken has graciously offered his expertise in helping Sean. Talk about selflessness: About 7-8 years ago, Peter – a longtime coworker of mine from my days at the Poughkeepsie Journal – volunteered to teach Adam Waterbury, perhaps our best thrower in D1 program history, how to throw the 35-pound weight. The teacher did a pretty good job: Adam went on to break Peter’s longtime SR in the event!

Hopefully, he can have similar success with Sean, who is a great guy to have on the team. We’ll get him working hard in the weight room, and working with Peter in any nook and cranny in McCann that we can find. Note to Peter and Sean: We may even be able to secure the racquetball court for practice?!?! We’ll “weight” and see. Ha! Couldn’t resist …

--Losing his lunch: Junior sprinter Mike McCloskey had a pleasant surprise in the 60-meter dash. After a strong dash in which he had one of the better starts I have seen in quite a while, he contentedly returned to the bleachers to have his lunch. Much to his surprise, just as he was digging in, it was announced that his time was the fourth fastest and that he had qualified for the finals!

So much for lunch! He scurried back to the infield, put on his spikes, and proceeded to rip out a 7.31-second time, a PR of .01. As teammate Dan Conklin astutely pointed out, if Mike does that for 100 more meets, he’ll have improved by a full second. Thanks for the math lesson, Dan. Nicely done, Mike!

--Strong day for Josh: Kudos to junior sprinter Josh Lopez for his strong day. Josh ran well in the 500-meter dash (note: I erroneously noted this as a PR, it was not; my bad), and then ran a strong 400 relay leg on the 4x400. Josh is one of the hardest workers we’ve got, and it was great to see.

--No style points: Countering McCloskey’s great start, freshman Taylor Bombard had one of the poorest starts I have ever seen, in the 60-meter hurdles. Despite this, he ran a solid race and has transitioned up to the higher hurdle height pretty well. Taylor needs to get over the fact that even the fastest hurdlers bang those things around. It’s a noisy event. There are no style points. My oldest son Joey, who for the third year in a row acted as my assistant coach for the day at this meet, asked if “points were taken off” for knocking down the hurdles. They are not. And so Taylor, bash away. Just get to the finish line as fast as you can.

--Let’s make a deal: The above photo, taken by distance runner Ryan Fitzsimons (side note: Our deal was that I would not post his rather desultory 5,000 race splits in exchange for this really cool photo!), is of fifth-year senior Conor Shelley and freshman Isaiah Miller, in the 800-meter run. Isaiah took the old guy to school, beating him by two seconds. In fairness to Conor: He was running on a double, after a decent mile; and, as he pointed out to me this morning, Go-Saiah cut him off shortly after this photo was taken. I do not recall that. But hey, all is fair in racing. Thank you, Fitz, for this awesome photo – one of the coolest track photos from our team that I have seen.

--Pick up the pace!: I have never seen the usually mild-mannered freshman distance runner Mike Clausen so pissed off than he was after his 3,000 race – which, all things considered, was a strong effort. Clausen had good reason. The early pace was ridiculously slow. In fact, after 100 meters, I commented to Fitz or whoever was standing next to me that it looked like the start of a marathon. Very slow. The pace remained rather pedestrian through 1600, when like a bolt out of the blue the lead runners shifted gears, leaving poor Clausen high and dry.

Now, Clausen’s a good runner. But he cannot go from 36-second laps to 31-second laps, which is what the leaders did. Mike hung on gamely in no-man’s land. We’re hoping to get him in a more reasonable race later in the winter.

Most importantly, this was a great comeback effort. Just two weeks prior to Yale, Mike was lying in a hospital bed with meningitis – now, before I start a major health scare, it was VIRAL meningitis, the much less severe form of the terrible illness. This obviously cost him his final XC race (IC4A), but he obviously bounced back quickly, too. Good stuff.

Women’s meet:

--Welcome back, Jackie!: Great to see sophomore Jackie Gamboli back on the track and running fast again. Jackie has had a lot of bumps in the road. She ran all of last winter season with mono. Her second-place finish Saturday in the 800 in 2:18.61 was not a PR, but it was faster than she ran all last winter, and shows she is well on her way back. She redshirted XC this fall, too, so it has been a long time coming for Jackie. Great stuff!

--Old vs. new: Speaking of great stuff, the women’s 3,000 race was awesome. We welcomed back graduate student Brittany Burns for the beginning of her fifth and final year of eligibility. Britt ran a strong and consistent race and had a nice kick en route to her first-place finish in 10:15.00. She caught and passed our freshman phenom Kiersten Anderson, who had a strong second-place finish as well. Kiersten was upset at her race. But really, she was coming off a long and hard XC season in which she was as dominant and consistent a lead runner as our program has ever had. Making that transition to the track is difficult, but she ran a time that was just a few ticks off the Junior National qualifying time, which she most certainly should get at some point in the winter.

The really cool thing was seeing the time-tested veteran and fifth-year grad student working hard in the same race as our next generation of Lady Foxes. Britt has had a great career here and has been a wonderful team leader. I’m sure we will be talking the same way about Kiersten in a few years. For me, it’s just neat seeing the past and present coming together in the same race, and we’re fortunate that we’ll probably see that a few more times in the next 5 months or so.

--Who's who: OK, here we go again. It took this old coach about 2.5 years to figure out the difference between twins Tom and Bryan Dixon, who graduated last year. I was able to decipher twins Elizabeth and Allyson O’Brien (current junior distance runners) a little quicker. Now, we have the jumping twins of Kristen and Shannon Vogel, who hopelessly I will confuse for quite a while, I am certain! Both ladies are great long and triple jumpers, and that will add variety and points to our team. Just don’t ask me who is who – at least for a few more years.

Sorry for the long post. Thanks for reading, as always.