SPORTS
Nuttycombe’s squad moves outdoors
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by Michael Poppy
Thursday, March 17, 2005
Fresh off its third-place finish at the NCAA indoor championships, the Badger men’s track and field team begins its preparation for the outdoor season, hoping to duplicate its indoor success and garner its seventh Big Ten Triple Crown in the last 10 years.
The Badgers open up the outdoor season this weekend at the Baldy Castillo Invitational in Tempe, Ariz., and will also travel to the Arizona Invitational and the Stanford Invitational, along with the women’s squad, over spring break.
Despite the fact that the Badgers closed out the indoor season in a fashionable manner, winning the Big Ten indoor title and placing third at nationals, head coach Ed Nuttycombe gears his team toward being a better outdoor team.
“We’ve always geared and pushed ourselves to be better outdoors, although we’ve been pretty good indoors, too,” Nuttycombe said. “I don’t know whether it’s just because we’ve got some talented athletes or whether by accident or whatever, but we always try to be better outdoors and we try to say, ‘Run well indoors, but leave a couple stones unturned, some things to do that are going to make you better outdoors.’ I don’t know what the results speak to, but I know that our focus is to be better outdoors.”
Assistant coach Mark Napier agrees with Nuttycombe, citing the added long-distance events in the outdoor season that the Badgers have much talent in.
“Outdoors, we’re much better,” Napier said. “We have some more distance events and we’re typically better in the outdoor distances. We have the steeplechase, we have the 10,000, [for] which we have better, longer runners. We have a lot of people that are good long runners, obviously because of the cross-country team so we’re more in tune for (outdoors).”
With the start of the outdoor season, some of the track and field athletes may have to adjust to new events that they are not accustomed to during the indoor season. Even 3,000-meter indoor national champion Chris Solinsky is going to experiment in different events as the team primes itself up for outdoors.
“Right now I’m just taking it week by week, whatever (assistant coach) Jerry (Schumacher) has me do,” Solinsky said. “I’ve been trying a little bit of steeple stuff so we’ll see how that goes. I have no idea what I’m doing. Jerry mentioned the 800 somewhere in the season and lots of 1500s. So I don’t know. It’s going to be up in the air.”
Regardless of what events the track athletes will be competing in, most of them are simply looking forward to competing outdoors as most of them feel that’s where their strengths lie.
“I’m usually better outdoors, except for last year,” pole vaulter Darren Niedermeyer said. “Outdoors you usually have some wind on your back so you’re a little bit faster and bigger meets are usually outdoors so you just feed off of the fans and the good weather.”
