Enter Sand man

On Wednesday, we welcomed a new member to our Marist track family -- Dr. Greg Sand, an adjunct faculty member at Marist. Dr. Sand, wildly successful in his professional career, has had sort of a cult following among members of our track team, as an immensely popular professor. I can't tell you how many times I heard our guys raving: "Dude. Sand is the MAN." To which, inevitably, I would make a bad pun about the Metallica song that inspired the title of this post.

Anyway, Dr. Sand is a new addition to our Faculty Mentor Program in athletics. I am on a committee that is trying to revive, restart and revitalize this program. There are some programs and some Faculty Mentors who have made it work; on the whole, though, it has been hit or miss. Years ago, Dr. Keith Strudler was a very active Faculty Mentor with our program. His life is quite busy now, and he no longer travels with us as frequently as he once did.

With this program, we wanted our student-athletes to recommend professors to be Faculty Mentors. On the men's side, Dr. Sand was the nearly unanimous choice. He gladly accepted our invitation. I met him last week at a reception for Faculty Mentors, and he seemed eager to join us at a Wednesday practice to see what we're all about.

Now he knows what we're all about: A vagabond, slightly dysfunctional but highly motivated and hard working group of athletes who travel around like a lost tribe in vans searching for places to run fast without getting yelled at too much. Dr. Sand blended in nicely with our group. He knew several of our athletes, and the ones he did not know he easily engaged in conversation. He seemed genuinely interested in the interval workout sessions we were doing. Again, he fit right in. We are hopeful he will continue to come out with us to practices and maybe even a few meets.

Enter Dr. Sand. Welcome aboard!