“This is the fun time of the year coming up.”
With only one more competition standing between the SEC Outdoor Championships, A&M head coach Pat Henry is excited for his track and field teams (men No. 1, women No. 9), which will make the trip up north to Fort Worth, Texas this weekend for the TCU Horned Frog Invitational.
“[This meet] gives Aggies in the Dallas Fort Worth area a chance to come watch our team run. We’re hoping for a pretty good turnout,” A&M head track coach Pat Henry said. “We’ve never taken a team up to TCU in my eleven years here, so I’m looking forward to going up there. This should be a very low-key competition, after coming off of one of the biggest meets of the season. That’s actually a very good thing for our team right now. You just can’t hit it that hard every week.”
Last week’s competition, the 121st Penn Relay Carnival in Philadelphia, put the Aggies up against over a hundred others school from all over the country. Not only that, but the runners were forced to deal with horrible weather conditions and temperatures that dipped into the low 40s. These factors combined to produce less than ideal conditions for record setting performances, but the Aggie women were able to do just that by winning their seventh consecutive Penn Relay 4×100 relay title.
“I’ve never had women’s [4×100] relay team qualify for a final and run 46 seconds. That’s so slow, it’s ridiculous,” said coach Henry. “But then to come back and run three and a half seconds faster in the finals in the worst lane you get on the track, we were ready to compete and they did a great job winning that race. To win it seven years in a row, nobody does that. Our ladies rose to the occasion.”
Coach Henry added that the weather conditions were the worst he could remember in his twenty years of coaching. Even so, he said he was proud of the performances by both of his teams. Despite missing senior sprinter Bralon Taplin, the Aggie men’s relay teams still found a way to finish as the top collegiate finisher in all but one race.
“[On the men’s side] we feel good about what we did,” said Henry. “We [only] got beat by one other school last week. LSU beat us in the mile relay. But we were minus Bralon and that’s the first time that we’ve been beaten in the mile relay in a couple of years. We competed well, we had a great track meet in Philadelphia, and we came away with some good things.”
The season is now approaching its climax and the Aggies are hoping to stay healthy and build confidence in their last competition before championship season. After this, the Aggies will travel to Starkville, Mississippi for the SEC championships, which are from May 14-16.
