After a season of ups and downs, the Texas A&M track and field concluded its 2013-2014 season with a celebration for the Aggie women’s win of the NCAA National Championship at the University of Oregon and the men’s third place finish, Monday morning at the Gilliam Indoor Track.
The Aggie women’s team brought home the championship on Saturday by scoring 75 points and edging out runner-up Texas — who scored 66 points. This is the fourth championship that the women’s track team has won since 2009. Additionally, both the men’s and women’s track teams each won three championships in a row from 2009 to 2011.
Assistant Coach Vince Anderson said he was proud of and impressed by how his players rose up to meet the competition.
“Well I think that the way I would put it is, the stakes at any title event are always high,” Anderson said. “So to put it in basketball and football terms, we played the games with no turnovers. No turnovers at all. Every scoring opportunity that we thought we had at the meet, we met those expectations or exceeded them.”
In route to winning the national championship, the Aggie women defeated their former in-state rival Texas. Anderson said that it was “sweet” to beat Texas, but only because they were a worthy opponent.
“We don’t focus on beating Texas, we want to beat LSU and Texas and UCLA and Oregon,” Anderson said. “Texas is a very worthy opponent but we want to beat everyone. Over the last 10 years we’re 8-2 against Texas at NCAA outdoors. Now we are 3-7 against them at NCAA indoors. But outdoors is the show. Outdoors is real track and obviously we’ve had a really good run against them. They are a worthy opponent. We’re honored to beat them, but to us, they are just another team.”
Sophomore Jennifer Madu — who competed in the women’s 100-meter dash and the 4×100-meter relay — said the team had a rough start to the season, but was happy that they were able to compete at a high level.
“I felt like this season we had a lot of ups and downs, a lot of trials and tribulations that we had to go through with people getting hurt and people just not finding their race pattern like they had wanted to,” Madu said. “I’m just glad by the time nationals and regionals came a long we were able to just get it together, execute all of our race plans on the same day and come out with a championship.”
Sophomore Shelbi Vaughn said it was a lengthy competition week, since nationals started on Wednesday and ended on Saturday. Vaughn, who only competed in the outdoor season, broke her record of 198 feet and 10 inches in the discus throw, winning the NCAA title.
“Well I had two fouls at the beginning. I had a lot of pressure on me because I was favored to win, but I was also favored to win last year, seeing I had an injured back and wasn’t able to go to the National Championships,” Vaughn said. “There was twice as much pressure on me this year. I was supposed to win last year and I was supposed to win this year, and people were asking ‘can she do it?’ I think I proved to them that I could.”
The women’s team wasn’t the only one to start off the season on a trying note. Senior sprinter Carlyle Roudette said several players suffered injuries earlier in the season, but that it all eventually worked out in the end.
“There was definitely a lot of adversity we had to face,” Roudette said. With Aldrich [Bailey Jr.] breaking his foot and Bralon [Taplin] being out, we had a bunch of different guys to run the 4×4. We weren’t sure who was going to run it and then for it to come together in the end like it did at the end, it was just like the movies, that’s how its supposed be and that’s how it played out.”