MAAC Indoor Championships: Some thoughts

Got a text on Sunday morning from an old coaching buddy, a guy who has been around the MAAC (and for a short time, coached in the MAAC) for many, many years. He was scanning the first-day results from the MAAC Indoor Championships at the Armory and noting the entry fields for Sunday’s finals. He texts me: “Conference looks a little different than the past. Iona and Marist with guys in the 60 and 200 final.” Yes. Iona and Marist with guys in the 60 and 200 final. And how about THIS? Iona guy wins the 200; Marist guy wins the 60! Whoa. What kind of bizarro world are we living in? In the natural order of things, for many years, Iona wins MAACs in XC every year, Marist is a proud second; then we move indoors and Iona dominates the distance events, running tactical races and vexing those proud but slower Marist runners into submission, Red Fox athletes and coaches shaking their heads in frustration as we got “Iona-ed” once again. The finals of the sprint races? That’s when Coach Pete, and whoever the current Iona coach is, can be found eating ham sandwiches and sipping coffee in the hospitality room at the Armory.

Well, well, well. Things have changed now, haven’t they? Oh sure, in the men’s 3km on Sunday night, Iona “Iona-ed” the rest of the league. But unlike in the past, it’s not just proud Marist runners getting vexed and shaking their heads in frustration and they stumble off the track wondering what the hell just happened. Not your brother’s MAAC. A lot more depth in every event, from every corner of the MAAC. Yes, the XC and distance landscape has gotten more crowded. Our men don’t get 2^nd much anymore in XC. We’re not the only guys getting Iona-ed in the distance races. But we’re also starting to score in the sprints.

We were asked by other coaches: When did Marist get sprinters? Alert followers of the program – we don’t count some of these other coaches in this cohort – know that we’ve ALWAYS had sprinters. And back in the day, field events too. A quick glance at our record board in the McCann Center will tell you that. Every event is covered, many with pretty darn good records, many of them frozen in time – because, well, where exactly are we going to practice the pole vault? Coach Terry Horton is in charge of the sprinters; does an amazing job with them. He’s not responsible for recruiting them; that’s the job of the idiot holding the stopwatch and sipping coffee somewhere. It’s hit or miss. Mostly miss. In case you forgot, it’s kinda hard to recruit non-distance athletes to Marist. What, exactly, do we tell jumpers and throwers about how we train for those events in the winter, when there is snow on the ground? But we try. We want them. Other distance-based schools don’t try, don’t want them. Iona used to be like that. Now, they have sprinters – damn good ones, talented and tough athletes. We’re catching up. We’re trying. We’re trying to reinvent ourselves into a full track program. It’s a work in progress, a long one at that, with a fair amount of randomness in the equation. Points are points; doesn’t matter where they come from.

So yeah. No more ham sandwiches during the sprint races. We’ve got athletes. Most of them don’t advance, don’t place high, but they’re trying really hard at it. We’re trying really hard at it. Yes, we’ll continue to clog up the distance races – with wonderful athletes like the ones we had scoring on Saturday and Sunday: Ramsey and Graham in the men’s 5km; Hayley medaling in the women’s 5km; Denise and Emily scoring in the mile; Denise (again!) and GT in the 3km; our 3km guys getting shut out of the scoring but running their asses off, closing hard in the last 1km (just not as hard as those darn Gaels); our 4x800 relays taking us for a wild ride at the end of the meet. We are still a proud middle- and long-distance program. But we’re also quite proud of all our “other” athletes in the “other” events. We hope to keep adding athletes, covering as many events as we can, maybe even scoring a few points along the way. We are fortunate and blessed to have our rocket, Glenmour, winning a MAAC title. But look closely. Jeremy Mooney is right there too. He scored in the 200. When you are checking for Marist track results now, check all the events. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll have some more surprises for you in the coming seasons.