Plenty of assistance

The last few weeks of the outdoor track season, which happens to be right now, are among the busiest of the entire year in our calendar. In the span of a few weeks, there are several meets crammed in there, with several hundreds of miles that need to be traveled via bus and van. Usually, I am the primary van shuttler between Penn Relays, Yale, Vassar and daily practice. But these things cannot be accomplished on crutches, so Coach Horton and Coach Chuck have had an extremely busy few days.

On Thursday and Friday, Terry did the Penn shuffle, which involves driving our athletes down to the hotel outside of Philly, driving into Philly to get the Penn Relays packet, driving back to the hotel to get the athletes, and back to Philly for the meet. And then again on Friday, before returning to campus in the evening. A day “off” on Saturday to attend to family things, and then back at it at Yale on Sunday.

Chuck? Yikes! He had quite the whirlwind weekend. He checked in at the ladies’ practice on Thursday afternoon, then drove down to Penn for the Thursday night distance races. He left Penn on Thursday night and drove to Mahwah, NJ, crashing there for a few hours before going to his teaching job on Friday morning. He worked a full day, came to practice in the afternoon, and then drove the women who were competing on Saturday at Penn down to Philly again on Friday afternoon/evening. Up early for Kristi Licursi’s awesome racewalk on Saturday morning; back to Franklin Field for the women’s 4x800 relay on Saturday afternoon; back to Poughkeepsie late Saturday night; up early Sunday for the Yale meet all day. And then at night, it was trying to figure out the entries for this week’s meets. And then, back at work on Monday morning. Phew. Got all that?

And now this week, we have the Vassar Twilight meet on Friday night, followed by MAAC on Saturday/Sunday down at Monmouth. It’s a lot of traveling, planning and logistics in a short amount of time. It’s a lot of assistance from our assistant coaches, and we insist that they are the best guys for the job. We are grateful for them each and every day, but especially in these busy late April days. Nicely done.