The first day of spring hopefully means sunshine and flowers; it always means the start of spring sports, including track. Members of the track team can be found in the weight room, down at the track, and running around town every day after school. The coaches are there too, helping the track and field athletes train. Doctor L, the Head Girl’s Coach for spring track, answered some questions for the Madison Dodger Online.
Madison Dodger Online: What are your hopes for this track season?
Doctor L: My hopes are for the girl’s team to be more competitive in our dual meets, relay meets, and championship meets.
Madison Dodger Online: What are spring track practices like? What are the meets like?
Doctor L: Well, you can say (the meets) are chaotic, because there’s a lot of things going on on any given day. We have a lot of people running, jumping, throwing, hurdling. Meets are very similar. There are always a lot of things going on at the same time. All of the championship and invitational meets have twenty or thirty teams competing.
Madison Dodger Online: What are your expectations of members of the track team?
Doctor L: I expect people to be there every day, I expect people to work hard, and I expect people to be committed to their team members.
Madison Dodger Online: How is being on the track team now different from when you were in high school?
Doctor L: It’s not much different. The only difference really is that now we have nice all-weather tracks to run instead of the poorly maintained cinder tracks I had to run on.
Madison Dodger Online: How long have you coached high school track and cross-country? Has your experience been different over the years?
Doctor L: I’ve coached for thirteen years. The big difference for me over the years is that I’ve gone from being an assistant coach to a head coach, which is more challenging because you have to do a lot more planning and coordination as a head coach. Also, you’ve gone through a process of learning how to coach the difference events because there’s so many of them: jumping, throwing, running, hurdling.
Madison Dodger Online: What’s the most challenging aspect of coaching track? What’s the most fun part about coaching track?
Doctor L: Getting students to go from someone who participates in sports to being an athlete. Also, it’s nice to be able to spend a couple of hours outdoors every day.
Catch the track team at the next meet, on Saturday, April 27.