The Alabama track and field team will host seven schools this Friday and Saturday for the Alabama Relays. This meet marks the start of the outdoor season, and is in Tuscaloosa since an Oct. 13 cross country meet.
“You’re always more comfortable [at home]. You always have that home field advantage. You usually get better performances,” head coach Dan Waters said. “The kids are excited. Their friends and family are in the stands. It just becomes a great atmosphere for the athlete.”
Two weekends ago, five athletes earned All-American accolades, the most for Alabama since six athletes in 2001.
“Those are obviously some of the core athletes on our team. We’d like them to continue to keep improving and setting a little higher bar for themselves,” Waters said. “Hopefully, that atmosphere and that culture can trickle down to everyone else on the team, and everyone continues to raise their efforts and personal bests and have just a little better marks.”
The start of the outdoor season is the start of an entirely new season, with additional events and different records than the indoor season. The javelin, the discus, the hammer throw, the 400m hurdles and the 10,000m are some of the additional events that are contested during the outdoor season. Only two weekends separated the indoor and outdoor seasons. Between the two, the track and field team is in nearly constant competition for five months. On its own, the outdoor season spans almost three months, with only one weekend without a meet.
“A lot of things are quite different from the indoor season to the outdoor season as we kind of get started. The outdoor season is a slow buildup as well because it is a very long season. This [meet] kind of just kicks it off. We’ll be competing from this point all the way to mid-June,” Waters said. “It definitely takes the right amount of energy and the right amount of focus, and honestly we’re still working on a lot of technical stuff.”
The team is very young. The majority is made up of freshmen and sophomores who are still getting used to the two seasons back-to-back. Along with the two seasons back-to-back, the team has two meets on the weekends surrounding spring break. Waters said he does not have a problem motivating the team.
“The sport of track itself really motivates the athletes because you see little improvements every single time you compete, so a long jumper may only get 3 or 4 inches of improvement from one meet to the next. That starts adding up like, ‘Hey I got a little bit better this week. I got a personal best in the discus,’ or whatever might happen,” Waters said. “It’s a self-motivating thing where the performances drive the ambition for them. Of course, our athletes are incredibly dedicated, as they are in any sport.”
