Blogs : John Wise

Shocker women win MVC, still bleary eyed from the trip

Well I have seemed to turn the corner on a hectic, yet successful, weekend in Southern Illinois at the Missouri Valley Conference Championships.  On top of the stresses of the weekend and preparation beforehand, I ended up getting sick on the 10-hour bus ride there and was ill the entire rest of the weekend.  I am only now feeling close to 100%.  Being sick sucks, but being sick on a conference meet weekend is the worst.

First of all, I wanted to talk a little but about how we prepare, as a staff, for a conference meet.  This is the meet we work towards as a team the entire season (indoor and outdoor) and being part of Coach Rainbolt’s staff at Kent State I already knew how he would prepare his teams at Wichita State.

We look at our entries and try to figure out how we can squeeze out every point we can.  Sometimes we get a little ridiculous about how we initially enter people because we are so concerned with trying to win a championship or trying to finish as high as we possibly can.  For example, this weekend we were the favorites on the women’s side and in a battle for 3^rd through 6^th on the men’s side.  We feel like if we don’t win, we desperately need to get 2^nd and if not 2^nd then 3^rd and so on and so on.  We preach this to our team as well because every point counts and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been part of conference championships that were decided by someone not running through the line or one centimeter in the triple jump.  My alma mater Kent State lost the 4x4 this weekend by nine hundredths of a second to Eastern Michigan, and thus the meet by 2 points.  I’m sure they will look through the results and find places they could’ve scored 2 points.  Hopefully after the meet we feel like we’ve exhausted every possible point scoring opportunity.

We left a day early (Wednesday) for our Friday-Saturday competition.  It’s a long haul to Southern Illinois from Wichita so we stopped at the University of Missouri for a quick workout and then proceeded the rest of the way Wednesday night.  Thursday was a light day to relax and check out the facility before the annual coach’s meeting.  This was my first MVC coach’s meeting and unfortunately we were in a room with bad acoustics.  You couldn’t hear the person next to you but you could hear people 20 feet away – it was weird.  I felt like we were back in elementary school where the students had a substitute teacher for the day and no one cared if they talked the entire time.

Afterwards we gave the Missouri State coaching staff a ride home.  We had an eight passenger vehicle and their three coaches gave us nine people for the ride home.  Distance coach Greg Hipp volunteered to ride in the trunk and luckily he survived the short trip back to their hotel.  There you go Greg, you are now officially part of my blog!

We had a team meeting Thursday night to give the Shockers an idea about the logistics of the meet and where we needed to perform well during the weekend.  I guess you could say its one of those motivational “go get ‘em” type of meetings where Coach Rainbolt is so good.  I usually feel like I am ready to lace them up and go run after the meeting – although I would have trouble scoring in the women’s 200 nowadays.

We’ve had a lot of team members fall ill recently and we were definitely battling it all weekend.  I became one of the victims as well.  I was really out of it on Friday but Rainbolt inspired me enough to stay out there all the way through the DMR’s and Saturday I started feeling better.  Our women got off to a great start in the field events and put up a big number Friday to give us a nice advantage heading into the final day of competition while our men started off slowly and were chasing the field the entire first day.

Saturday is always an emotional day full of ups and downs.  Conference champions are crowned and conference favorites run into trouble.  People who weren’t even in the top 10 on the yearly list advance through the prelims and score significantly high places.  That’s what it’s all about and the best thing is how kids from every event group get into supporting their teammates from other event groups.  We had a great spirit all weekend long and that propelled our ladies into the top spot, eventually winning by 44 points.  It is our 2^nd straight women’s indoor title and 6^th straight MVC title (including CC, indoor, and outdoor).

Our men’s team seemed to be just out of the big scoring places all day and finished in 4^th place.  It was disappointing but we are confident our men will be much better outdoors and move up the conference ladder at Drake in May.

After the post meet celebration for our ladies Coach Rainbolt narrowly avoided the traditional jug of water while two of our sprinters went flying through the water trying to get him.  Luckily no one was injured and Rainbolt stayed fairly dry.  We arrived home to Wichita at 6am from a long, tiring, yet successful weekend.  Time to rest right?  Nope, got recruits showing up in 6 hours.  Why?  Because 1^st is better than 2^nd, and 2^nd is better than 3^rd ……