Good weekend

Antowine Lamb

McPherson Track and Field had a good weekend. We had an auto qualifier for nationals in Antowine Lamb who jumped 6-9.5 in the High Jump which currently leads the nation and is the new school record. Andrea Swansons throw of 41-08.75 in the shot also provisionally qualified her for the national meet.

Rachel Leuthold also set a school record in the Pole Vault with 10-08.

There were 6 collegiate PR's from the team at this meet as well.

The team is having another great week of practice with some great weather to go along.....

Sunday we also found out that Torey Fry of Wichita East will be joining the Lady Bulldogs starting next fall with cross country. So all in all a very good weekend.

Three commit

Yesterday was a good day of recruiting. I had three people commit to McPherson. We had Sam Bolin of Kansas City MO, Paula Carpenter of Cheney KS and Brian Reed of Fort Scott all tell me they want to sign letters of intent to run for McPherson next year. I am very excited to add the three of them.

Team Dynamics

There are some team leaders that are starting to emerge from the group slowly but surely. It is nice to have people that I can trust within the team. I had a class room session with the distance people to go over why they are doing the workouts and mileage that I am having them do. There were a few questions that came up on people wanting to know. I have wanted to do this since I got here but have felt strapped for time on a daily basis to fit in the things we need to do and get them off to night class, work, dinner or wherever else they go after practice. So on Thursday we had an easy run so I decided to do it then. I went into the classroom and drew up a big calender and put all of our long runs and workouts up and talked them through the progression of everything. The exciting part about the whole meeting was that the majority of the group came out of it very excited not only for this season but for next year. I am going to do a much more in depth talk at cross country camp next summer, but I feel that the majority of them understand and buy in to what I am trying to accomplish. I am looking forward to the next few weeks. We have been able to get our miles up and for the most part people are healthy. We still have a few aches and pains but they seem like they are getting better, and everyone is adjusting to the new workouts and mileage. I am still increasing the long runs and am going to cut back to one morning run a week on Wednesday to see if they handle that better. This past week I gave them the mornings off to try and get everyone healthy again. I think that the transition next fall will go much smoother with people having put in the base work during the summer. We have a long run today and I am excited to see what they can do, each week has looked better and better, so three weeks into long runs we should look the best we have. The goal for today is 75 to 80 minutes for the top guys and 65-70 for the younger guys.