SPRING 2016

Coach James:

Spring '99 - Inaugural 24-Hour relay around main to fundraise for the 1st Track Club Spring Trip

Late April is a tipping point in the track season, a time when things really begin to blossom into fullness. We had an excellent winter training block, which culminated in our inaugural inter-squad relay. The coaches broke the team into three balanced teams (men, women, short sprinters, long sprinters, distance runners, etc) and let them determine an order, distance run by each leg, etc - and raced the squads over 5K. It’s a goofy sort of workout, an oddball day in our meticulous and detail oriented programing, but it served a purpose. After 6 weeks of grinding out the workouts and each student being segregated by fitness, event specialty, and their particular training needs, it brought the whole team together to compete and remember that Track & Field is fun! It was a great springboard into the season, and into our 9th Tucson Spring Break training and racing trip.

Thirty men and women - about half of the team - fundraised their way out to the sunny trails and tracks of Tucson where they put in some great training and opened the season with a slew of personal best marks at the University of Arizona. While some wintery weather conspired to provide difficult early spring conditions back in the northeast (we were literally snowed out of an April 9th meet), the unity, focus and championship mentality of the team was only reinforced by the adverse conditions. One week before the Liberty League Championships, Senior Taylor Vann modeled this tenacity for us all in his season opening Decathlon - racking up school records in the 100m, Shot Put, Discus, Pole Vault, High Jump, and Javelin as well as multiple season best and personal best marks over the two day meet to score another school record, and what was then a DIII nation leading, 6598 points in the decath. Several weeks later Taylor still sits 3rd on the National list and his advancement to Nationals is almost certain - Vassar’s first Decathlete could also very well be our first National Championships competitor in the Decathlon.

Josh Weinstein ('96) (100m SR holder for 20 years) and Amy Heathcoat ('96) racing at Yale circa '96

The “firsts” just keep piling up. It’s almost cliche at Vassar, a school founded on firsts and being historically groundbreaking, but it never gets boring. Vassar’s field day tradition, begun in 1895, was the first Track & Field competition for women in all of the Americas. Despite that auspicious early start in Track, Ron arrived to coach the cross country team in 1982 without a track program in place - an ironic twist as collegiate cross country began as a sport to support the track teams of schools in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. Ron helped students found the VSA Track Club in 1985, and many of us remember those fledgling years of track - stealing the athletics Vans to drive to Arlington High School or running the 3 miles through the farm out to Spackenkill High school to run workouts. Scraping together a crew of runners to head to a college meet with one or two Vans, while Ron carved out an afternoon or two a week and his Saturday's away from his family and paying job to support our dreams.

In 2008 we started our first season as an athletic department supported NCAA Varsity team, on our brand new 8-lane track, and only three years later had our first NCAA qualifiers. 2014 saw our first All-Americans, and 2015 our first (Vassar’s First!) National Champion. You are all (students, alumnae/i, parents) a part of this success, this family, this story. The sweat, the despair, the injury, the personal triumphs, self doubt and self discovery, the victory - the process of becoming all that we are and learning to succeed together as a part of this team is the legacy we are creating over and over again. It is continuing to blossom into fullness every season.

A big part of this experience is our coaches. While the track club started with Ron’s volunteer mentoring, we are now lucky to have a crew of coached supporting our students. I continue to Direct the XC/Track programs and primarily coach the distance and mid-distance events with the support and insights of Emeritus Coach Ron and (new this season) Coach Erica Maker. Erica comes to us with years of experience coaching at Williams, where she helped coached multiple all-americans and a 10K national champion. She brings a smart eye and nuanced perspective to the distance runners, and has been an awesome addition. When not overseeing the distance runners, I’m supporting Interim Head Track Coach Justin Harris and volunteer John “Brooksy” in mentoring our sprints, hurdles, relays and field events. Justin’s full time presence on the team has really enhanced the caliber and depth of experience for the whole track team, and he acts as our recruiting coordinator and the full time head coach for our SPower (speed/power event) student-athletes, mentoring their development and scripting their training with great care. Brooksy has been a long stalwart of the team, providing a depth of experience and intrinsic knowledge with sprinting, a mind numbing array of nicknames and catchphrases (“Cheese and bread…. Gotts to be be more careful!), and a great love of track. Evan Lasher has dropped in to help us perfect our throwers technique, and his insights helped power Taylor to three of those school record breaking throws in the decath. I’m profoundly grateful for the help these coaches provide our students - you can’t build a truly excellent track team all by yourself and it is a treat to have such compassionate and knowledgeable partners in my mission to make VassarXCTF the greatest program it can be.

A few weeks ago we had our first Vassar Athletics Alumnae/i gathering at the New York Athletic club to gather Vassar Athletic Alum of multiple generations to celebrate the history of athletics at Vassar and recognize the critical role that experience played for many of us in our college experience. It was exciting to reconnect with so many former VassarXCTF alum and recall the early days of our track team, and it was exciting to see the college put front and center the student-athlete experience. Having first experienced Vassar athletics as a student in 1995, and having now been a part of shaping that experience for students at Vassar for nearly 13 years, it is profoundly rewarding to see the college administration value and recognize that experience, as well as look to enhance it for future Vassar Student-Athletes.

With Liberty Leagues behind us, we have two weeks of the regular season left culminating in our home Twilight Meet (COME!) on May 6th - then three more weeks of last chance meets, ECAC’s and NCAA’s. So far this season, we have seen students achieve over 60 personal bests, 8 ECAC qualifiers, and multiple school records. And the best is yet to come. 

- James