Coaches Corner for April 28th: Maggie Lloyd, Ogden Track

With the Suncoaches corner here in KWBG, get a chance to talk some Ogden track. Maggie Lloyd joining us as the Bulldogs to tell you what, a real, it's always, I know, kind of tricky, Maggie, when the seniors go on the senior trip. I thought, though, number one, we could start with Drake Relays over the weekend, but I thought you guys competed pretty darn well without the seniors. Yeah, I would agree. We always talk about how we're sad to see them go. There are leaders that note that sort of thing, but then we always, every year, sit back and think, wow, look at all the kids that just stepped up and ran things that maybe made them uncomfortable, tried new things to help as a team and score points and to fill relays. So, yeah, I really thought the kids stepped up and competed great while the kids were gone. And then, yeah, Drake Relays, we ran our four by one on Saturday and had a senior who actually flew back from New York City so that he could compete and run that. And they ran great. They hadn't practiced any handoffs or ran that relay for a week. So, it's always nerve-wracking, especially when you have a kid that just blew the day before. You don't know how that's gonna make him feel. I'm sure if he didn't get lots of sleep during the senior trip, but came back and they PR'd and ran their best time and competed awesome. I always think that experience at Drake, and I don't care if you run there a hundred more times or one time or whatever, I always just feel like that first time you're out on that track, Maggie, it's going to help you the rest of the season because you've been on the biggest stage. I mean, that is where everybody's trying to get. There's no question on my mind that these four, it's gonna help them not just this season but down the road too. Absolutely, and this was the first time for all four of those kids to compete at that oval. And so, some of them have gone as alternates and gone to state track to watch, but none of them have actually been down there and competed, so it was a great experience for all four of them, and I know they were just in awe of all of it. What about you, coach? What was it like taking that quartet down there? Oh, it was a lot of fun. I've had the privilege of taking some girls four by ones down there since being here in Ogden. I would love it if we could get both of the boys and the girls team down there next year. I think that that would be super awesome. So, it was a lot of fun. It was fun to sit back and just watch them as kids, take it all in, and have that experience. No, wait a second. Miss non-patient, Terry, you were okay just kind of sitting back and watching, huh? Yeah, as soon as they were down on the track and I knew they were with somebody else, I was good to go. Well, tell me about, okay, now districts came out, we know about state qualifying meet. Let's start on the boys side since that's kind of where we are right now. A challenging field, number one, I like the fact you're not driving 19 hours to have to go to the state qualifying meet. There's a positive for me, number one. What did you think when you first saw the fields? You know, I wasn't surprised. When we saw the different potential, like the sites that we're gonna be hosting, we anticipated heading to Story City. And so, not shocked, we're gonna have some good competition especially on the sprinter side of things and they are gonna have to compete and run for time. And we've met with the kids and just reminded them just because you don't get first or second, doesn't mean you don't qualify, it just means you have to wait 12 to 24 hours to find out that you made it. So, keeping that in mind is really important when we go into the state qualifying meet. Well, I'll tell you what, the boys, as you talked about without some fabulous seniors as well, but I thought that Southeast Valley Co-ed, if that doesn't show these youngsters what they can do without seniors, and now you're thinking, now we got everybody back, they gotta be pretty pumped about, not just what's to go tonight and this week, but for the coming weeks. Yeah, absolutely. Yesterday was our first day back with the seniors and it was nice to have a full gym again. You don't realize how much the seniors contribute to things until they're all gone. And so, it was fun to see everybody. I think they're a little tired still. So I'm glad we didn't have a Monday meet and we had a day of practice and then go and get to compete today at Woodward Granger. So, and it's Co-ed and I always love Co-ed and it's a chance to see everybody compete. So yeah, I am super optimistic about the rest of the season and I think the kids are excited. Well, then I go from the guys who I thought had a great week for you and then obviously, you know, capping it off at Drake Relays and I look at what the girls did at Southeast Valley. Holy cow, Maggie, if you had told me 136 points were going on the board without seniors, I would have said, are you sure about that? But what a night. Yeah, that was really exciting. We had a couple of opens where some girls took first and second and, you know, that's 18 points right there. So that's always fun to see those individual events coming back with multiple hardware and points. So yeah, they competed hard. They competed well. At the end, when they were announcing the team scores, I was around some of the girls from a distance and I watched them listen really intently and realized, oh, they just won. You know, they were celebrating and they got to do their victory lap and yeah, it's fun to sit back and see that and from a distance where they get to enjoy their hard work. It's tough for me to look at where I wanted to talk about because there's been some relays that I really wanted to talk about with you this time and I'm just going to lump them all together because I know we've got girls that have been on both but are on most of these actually, but I mean, Sprint Medley has had a fantastic season. I thought the four by one as well, shuttle hurdle. You're starting to kind of be known for the shuttle hurdle. Maggie, I'll let you maybe pick one of those three. If there's one, I'm not bringing up, but I've just been really impressed with the four that you put together when you put them together at whatever meet. Yeah, and that's been a lot of fun to mess around with and yeah, having our seniors gone, we're able to still run those events, which is really nice to be able to move girls around and have that opportunity to not stop our relays and yeah, our shuttle hurdle, they're right where they need to be to qualify for the state and we've had some younger girls step in while the seniors are gone and it's been fun to watch them compete. I'm hoping to still get our distance medley stacked and run that at some point and yeah, the girls have been working really hard. Also seems like we're starting to pick up some better points from the field events too, Maggie and I know you and I talk about that and I know that obviously field events are something that you're very passionate about with obviously high jump, but it feels like we're starting to kind of inch our way up and it doesn't have to be huge jumps, but I'm noticing we're starting to get some points out of those field events where that first running event isn't on the track yet and you've already got some points scored, which is if you wanna win something, that's what you gotta do. You do and the meets that we've gotten really close to winning, you know, it's the field events points that are making those other teams gain so many more points and so yes, we have started, we are young in that department, we are inexperienced in that department as a whole. So we've got kids that are freshmen, kids that haven't done this before trying new things and yeah, it's gonna take time, but we are definitely getting there. All right, so obviously Woodward Granger here tonight and with having everybody back, Maggie, and the first meet of the week, is this one of those where you kind of stack everything and see what you got? Yeah, we've stacked quite a bit. We've got a couple of relays that we're stacking for the first time, boy, door, girl, side, we've gotta have good seed times when it comes to conference and district relays. So in order to do that, we actually have to run those. So we are still mixing some things around, having lost some meets throughout the year has made it a little bit more difficult. So yeah, we're changing some things up and yeah, we have a Tuesday, Thursday this week, so Wednesday will be pretty light. Coach, as always, thank you so much for some time. Thanks for all the results as well and best of luck here the rest of the week. Thank you. You've got Maggie Lloyd again joining us. Ogden Track here on Coaches Corner.