By Mitchell Gilbert |
The Pilots’ 2014 indoor track and field season has begun in spectacular fashion. Not only have the Pilots begun the season blowing away many of their own personal records (PRs), several on the team have gone on to break long-standing school records.
During one of the first meets of the 2014 spring season at the Husky Invitational, redshirt junior Ryan Poland posted a school record mile time of 4:01 and placed second in the heat. On the same day, runners Melissa Baller, Julia Fonk, Lorea Ibarzabal and Madison Leek broke another school record in the 4 by 400-meter dash with a time of 3:58.98.
This accomplishment marked the second of three school records that Madison Leek has already broken in the young 2014 indoor season. Leek has managed to break records in not only the 400 meter dash, but also in the 600 meter dash during her first time running the race in competition, setting the school record at 1:35.98 and finishing first in the race.
As a sport partly centered on the individual and breaking one’s own PRs, track and field can lead to conflicts amongst competing athletes on the same team. However, this competition can be also taken advantage of, as the Pilots have shown they can do this season.
“If you know that somebody is running faster than you it always pushes you to run faster,” junior sprinter Kahlil Dumas said. “The competition motivates you and makes you work harder on your cardio and focuses you on watching what you eat. All of the competition is healthy though. Everyone is always positive and helpful with one another.”
Many of the sprinters attribute much of their current success to the addition of the new sprinting and jumping coach, Chad Colwell. Colwell has previously coached at UP and spent his last two seasons serving as both the interim head coach and assistant sprinting coach at Saint Martin’s University in Lacey, Wash. He has begun his second UP campaign successfully, pushing his runners to set many personal and school records.
“He has been fantastic for us, people are running much better than they did last season,” Dumas said. “He just knows everything that there is to know about sprinting, and if you tell him something hurts or is bothering you he can tell you exactly what the problem is.”
Coach Colwell has used his knowledge and experience to turn the sprinting and jumping team that was once overshadowed by the distance program into a program that Dumas, and others, believe has endless upward potential.
“In the sprinting world it is difficult for us to be able to take our team to the team to the next level running against these big schools,” Dumas said. “We are trying to get to the point where we can send some people to regionals, and next year we will have some people go.”
However, this track and field team does face some difficulties. A particular challenge for the team will be learning how to compensate for not having the state-of-the-art facilities that are given to athletes at other much larger schools that they compete against.
“Practicing upstairs in Chiles can be pretty tough,” senior high jumper Matt Winterer said. “It can be a huge disadvantage for some people, it isn’t really for us because we have a high jumping pit upstairs, but for the long and triple jumpers it can be tough practicing if they aren’t able to go outside.”
This a challenge the Pilots will have to overcome if they are going to compete against the bigger teams they face this season, such as University of Washington and University of Oregon.
The Pilots’ strong suit has always been running long distance races. Redshirt junior runner Julia Fonk believes that they have the skill and confidence to keep succeeding through the 2014 season.
“We definitely have a lot of strength with our longer distance runners. We just got a new girl from Sweden and she is looking to do some big things in the 10K this season,” Fonk said. “We have a lot of strong people in the 5K as well.”
The Pilots will begin their 2014 outdoor season Saturday March 1 at the Willamette Opener in Salem, Ore.
