Track team overcomes equipment shortages

Everysports  team has practice related challenges – be it bad weather or dated equipment – but what about nowhere to practice?

The track team has worked around not having an indoor track to practice on when the weather is bad by running the hallways and the stairs.

“We’re just trying to make do with what we have,” track team coach Cedric Austin said.

Though most people may see this as a disadvantage, Austin sees it as an opportunity. Not having all the facilities but being able to win meets gives the team a sense of pride and accomplishment.

“When you work with limited resources, you try to adapt the best you can. One thing we pride ourselves on is [that] we don’t make excuses,” Austin said.

While Austin tries to turn this into a positive for the team, sometimes the fact of the matter gets to the team. To the team, having a better track means having better conditions to train in.

“I feel [that] it hinders us a little bit. We don’t have the full facilities like the other schools around us normally have,” senior Seth Graham said.

Practice consists of warming up, stretching then running five or six miles. While running the halls gets the heart pumping, it is not quite the same as running an actual track. An outdoor track has a distance of 400 meters where an indoor track has a distance of only 200 meters.

“It’s a lot of different pacing and everybody in the state is [at the Cross Plex] because there is only one place to have a meet,” senior Bailey Herfurth said.

Austin hopes that one day the track team will have more facilities at their disposal, but for now they plan to keep turning this negative into a positive.

“We try not to focus on what we can’t control. All we can do is just adjust and then continue to push and work hard each and every day to get better,” Austin said.