This week begins “late season”. When we compete this Saturday, May 4, we will be less than two weeks from our conference Championship. That crucial fact will strongly determine our entry decisions for the track meet this week. Rather than attempting many things, we will focus solely on entering athletes in events where, in each case, a bit of work is needed or where we hope to add a bit of final polish, for the championship meets to come.  For the second time since April 19^th, we will compete at LSU, one of our favorite venues in the USA. We are always grateful for the opportunity to run at Bernie Moore Stadium.

Regarding last weekend, we had a mixed bag of results at Penn, ranging from wonderful (women’s 4x100, men’s 4x200) to bungling (women’s 4x400 qualifying, men’s 4x400 final).

Our team got better in a few areas where improvement was needed. For the first time outdoors, we ran Kamaria Brown in the 4x100 relay, which we had been trying to put together. We left Philadelphia in a good state of team health.

Penn is a lengthy meet with a demanding schedule – especially if a team enters a broad spectrum of events like we did this year. We always come back tired. We give our team a day off today (Monday) to recover a bit, to have an academic day to start finals week prior to Friday exams, and to allow them to prepare and dress up for our Building Champions Awards Banquet, which is tonight. The banquet is for all athletes and recognizes academic achievement, as well as athletic recognition.

We resume practice tomorrow, which is also the last day of class. Best regards to all of our student-athletes here at Texas A&M, and nationwide, who are taking finals, even as the championship season approaches. To track athletes, my hat is off to you. It not the easiest thing to do to take finals within days of competing at one’s conference championship, but such is the calendar for track & field athletes annually. To the rest of us, don’t try that at home!