After Ed Nuttycombe’s 20 years at Wisconsin – years that have garnered a plethora of awards as the conference’s premiere men’s track and field head coach – his most recent honor, as the Big Ten’s Indoor Coach of the Year, left the veteran coach with a loss for words.
“Let me see if I can remember … Actually I think Diane [Nordstrom, the Sports Information contact] got the information and told me,” Nuttycombe said, struggling to remember how he was informed of his award. “It’s always an honor, they don’t normally have to vote for the winning team, and obviously most times they do because they vote for the team who apparently did the best job that year. But anyway you look at it, it’s still an honor.”
Nuttycombe led the Badgers to a surprise win at the 2003 Big Ten Indoor Championships, where the team claimed the title on the last two events. Three Badgers finished in the top four in the 5000 meters, while the 4×400 relay team took second place in the meet’s last event to claim enough points to clinch the championship for UW.
With the meet coming down to the clutch, Nuttycombe said he wasn’t very rattled by the close finish against conference rival Minnesota.
“It’s not a strain. It’s kind of what makes it fun,” Nuttycombe said.
“To be honest, with this meet, I was probably the more relaxed at this meet than many of the other previous meets. This was one of those ones where we were one of several teams that had a chance to win. I didn’t feel like we had to win because we were the favorite or the better team. It was fun. That’s why you hope a lot of them come down to the last few events like that; you rise to the occasion and meet the challenge. I think our guys obviously did.”
The meet really turned toward the Badgers after redshirt freshman Brent Boettcher cleared an NCAA provisional qualifying height of 7-feet-1, crowning UW’s first event champion in the high jump since 1985.
“We had three competitors in the [high-jump] competition, and Minnesota had three competitors, including the defending outdoor Big Ten champion,” Nuttycombe said. “It was one where heads up we really had a chance to mesh with them. Our guys got the better of them and really gave us the chance to get into the thick of the meet.”
The Badgers brought 28 athletes to the meet, and 26 of them scored. Part of the success at Champaign was due to the contributions of the team’s freshmen outside of Boettcher.
“One of the things that we talked about, if you go back and look at the team analysis of the year at the very beginning, [is that] we have some good athletes, we have a nice, solid team,” Nuttycombe said. “But in order for us to be a championship-caliber team we were going to have to count on some freshmen to step up, [who] hadn’t done it at that point, and obviously they did and that’s truly what made things happen for us.”
Freshmen Bobby Lockhart and Joe Detmer will compete in the NCAA Indoor Championships this weekend along with fellow freshman Boettcher in their respective events. In all, seven Badgers qualified for the meet, which will be held in Fayetteville, Ark.
After spring break, the team will come together and begin its preparations for the spring outdoors season. Nuttycombe, who has done so time and time again, must find a way to carry the successes of his team from one season to the next.
“That’s going to be the trick,” Nuttycombe said. “Indoors, we like to think we leave a couple stones unturned for outdoors, with all our athletes training-wise, and I think we have. I think the key is to continue to stay healthy and to continue to prepare to go to Minnesota after beating them narrowly outdoors here and narrowly indoors a couple weeks ago. So it will be a good challenge.”