Wolfie Invitational: We Play Track

Just getting back home from a long day in the strong wind and driving rain down at Stony Brook University; we drove vans today, and the results were just posted, so we’ll get them up here at some point on Sunday. Anyway. When the weather conditions turn nasty like this, the idea of personal-best or very competitive race times go out the window. This can be discouraging to our athletes, but instead we relayed an encouraging message to our athletes: Let’s go out there and Play Track today! Some background: Way back in the mid-1980s, when I was a track/XC runner at Marist, another Marist student happened upon me and another running teammate in the dorms. This kid was a bit of a lunkhead, a big football and baseball and basketball fan who if I recall played football and/or intramurals and about whom I definitely recall knew nothing about our sport. He says to us: “Yo. Guys. You Play Track?!?” Uh. Well. We don’t actually “play” track, dude. We “run” track or we “do” track. It’s not a ball sport that you “play.” You play baseball. You play football. You play lacrosse. You don’t “play” track or swimming or crew. My old teammates and I chuckle at this memory. But as I grow older as a coach, and as I tend to implore my athletes at times to “just race” and forget about the data and the clock and all of it, and just beat runners from other teams, it dawned on me: In so doing, we are actually “playing track.” It becomes a win/loss, zero-sum game, like the “other” sports.

And so today, as the wind destroyed umbrellas, challenged tent structures, made it difficult at times just to stand upright – and, in the case of freshman Samantha DeStefani in the 1,500-meter race, literally blew her off the track and into the high jump apron for a few strides, which led me to say “hey kid, don’t fall off the track!” to which she laughed hysterically mid-race – we said “screw it, just play track.” The message really resonated with our seniors, who only have a few more weeks to “play track.” And in so doing, it made standing, cheering and competing in the challenging weather on Saturday afternoon a little more manageable and a lot more fun.