Anyone who’s ever picked up a ball will agree that success in athletics is due to practice. The key to any sport is practice, whether it’s in a pool, on a football field, in a basketball court, on the ice of a hockey rink, in the turf of a lacrosse field, or in the case of the Massachusetts women’s indoor track team, in a field house on a track.
Except that’s not the case – not at all. In past years, the athletic facilities at Smith College have been made available to the team on certain nights, but this year that option was out, and that put the team in quite a predicament.
Basketball has first dibs on the space in Curry Hicks Cage, home at least to an indoor track of sorts, albeit one that tunnels so closely under bleachers that on the turns runners have to move into lane two to avoid being clipped by the corner. So reluctantly, Coach Julie LaFreniere adapted.
“Our goals with all of our meets would be to have each individual compete as well as they possibly can, but the lack of facilities makes that difficult,” LaFreniere said. “The only time we get to run on an indoor track at all is when we race.”
But even so, the team is running well. They placed 8th out of 12th at the Rhode Island Invitational last weekend with some fantastic performances. The meet turned out to be much larger than it was originally planned to be, but LeFreniere didn’t mind.
“The bigger the meet, the bigger the competition,” LaFreniere said.
Most meets are strong in at least one area. For example, distance, sprints, or throws, but with meets that size, there was bound to be competition in all events, and the Minutewomen handled it well.
In LaFreniere’s opinion, some of the most impressive performances of the day were actually the double performances of two veteran distance runners who both competed in the open mile and the Distance Medley Relay (DMR), (400meter, 800meter, 1200meter, mile).
Kate Markopoulos’s time of 5:18 may not have been enough to earn points in the mile, but later she anchored the DMR, running an amazing 5:17 for her second mile of the day.
“Kate Markopoulos ran really nice back to back miles,” LaFreniere said, “and that’s something she hasn’t done before. She really needs to be recognized for that.”
Ford ran the open mile in 5:22, and returned to race especially well for the Distance Medley, running 2:21 for the 800meter leg. Although Ford’s training was interrupted for a couple weeks during January, according to LaFreniere she’s definitely making a quick comeback.
“[Markopoulos and Ford] may not have scored points in the mile, but they came back to pull together an outstanding DMR, and that’s really an accomplishment,” LaFreniere said.
The best performance of the day was Elisabeth Budd, whose time of 1:16.9 just barely missed the time for the Eastern College Athletic Conference meet. But LaFreniere has no doubts that Budd will make it, hopefully at the Valentine’s Day Invitational tomorrow at Boston University. The brand-new 200meter, six lane banked track at BU is a proven fast track.
Although it’s not one of the team’s stronger seasons, LaFreniere and the team remain optimistic.
“The attitude is great, we just do what we have to do, and the athletes work incredibly hard,” LaFreniere said, “and no one complains about having to run outside in the cold at 8 a.m. every morning.”
Tomorrow’s meet is a higher-level meet. As the season progresses, and the number of runners in a meet raises, so do the expectations, and LaFreniere is using this meet as a chance to fine-tune the team at one of the fastest tracks in the country.
“We’re using this meet as a chance to help more people qualify for the big meets later in the season, like New Englands,” LaFreniere said.
Not bad for a track team whose only practices on actual tracks are in full uniform.
