Wednesday, March 30, 2011

April brings ... outdoor track!

By sprint/hurdle coach John Wise

As we get ready for the outdoor season to get in full swing, I thought I’d drop by and give an update as to what is going on with WSU Track & Field.

We were very proud of our teams at the end of the indoor season – obviously our women had just an incredible season, breaking the MVC Indoor scoring record and crowning three all-Americans at the NCAA Indoor Championships.  Our men came up just short of defending their title from last year, but fought for every point they could and made our coaching staff very proud!

Since then, our teams have been working hard.  Mostly it’s been getting back into some conditioning activities for a few weeks before the grind of the outdoor season begins.  Last weekend the multi’s and distance runners had great season openers, if you haven’t seen the results check them out on Goshockers.com – it was awesome!

The month of April will bring three home track meets to Wichita State’s Cessna Stadium beginning this Saturday, April 2nd, against Nebraska and Northern Iowa.  We’re very excited to have some quality competition coming to WSU in the upcoming weeks.  Competing at home is always a special experience and when you have a facility as nice as Cessna Stadium it can yield terrific moments for our athletes!  Hopefully we’ll see a large crowd this weekend and all through April!

Up in the office it’s been a little quiet recently.  Not because we haven’t been working hard, but because Coach Rainbolt had to take a short leave of absence.  As many of you know, Bolt underwent prostate cancer surgery a couple weeks ago and is recovering nicely and back at practice.  He was a little worried that he might miss our home opener but has bounced right back and is as good as ever!  Welcome back Bolt, it wasn’t the same without your unique energy and leadership around the office!

We’re also very excited as we have new recruits signing every week!  We’ll probably have a press release soon announcing some new Shockers!  We’re still recruiting hard and look forward to getting out to several high school meets in the upcoming weeks.

We are also having a lot of fun seeing our friends from the Shocker basketball team make their run through the NIT tournament.  Let’s hope we can hang another championship banner up in Koch Arena!!!

Other than that, everyone in Shocker Track and Field is chomping at the bit to get this outdoor season going.  Next week we head to the West Coast and Sacramento for the Mondo Mid-Major Challenge before heading back to Wichita for the KT Woodman Classic.  Let’s have a great outdoor season and Go Shocks!!!