Red Devil men finish 16th at indoor track championships

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Allen Community College’s track team competed at the 2015 NJCAA Indoor Track and Field Championships last weekend. The men finished 16th overall. No female athletes placed.
“They have a ranking system based on the number of athletes and what they qualified in,” coach Vince DeGrado said. “[The men] were ranked 17th going in.”
Some highlights for the men’s team included Pedro Montoya setting a new school record in the 5000-meters and Hunter Koike placing in the heptathlon.
Montoya placed seventh overall in the 5000m and finished in 15 minutes and 36.46 seconds. He also placed 13th in the 3000m run.
“Pedro finished seventh in the 5000m and he was ranked seventh going into the event,” DeGrado said. “That was a huge run for him and scored us points.”
Koike wasn’t expected to compete in the heptathlon. He was ranked 18th overall, and the top-16 athletes compete. DeGrado entered him anyway, in the off chance some other schools would not bring their athletes. Sure enough, two schools didn’t and Koike took the final spot to get into the event.
“Hunter finished 11th in the (heptathlon), when he was 16th going in,” DeGrado said. “That kid is a great athlete and has done a great job. I’m not a multi-event coach at all. I’ll be the first one to tell you, he isn’t getting coached as well as he could. I try to coach pole vault and shot put, but that’s not my forte. I’m still going to learn it and help the kid out.”
In the men’s 800m finals, Markeen Caine placed second overall and MeShach Adams took fifth. Caine finished in 1:55.97 and Adams finished in 1:57.89.
“MeShach was ranked 35th going into the event and Markeen was ranked 15th. Both made it to the finals and were sitting at fifth and sixth after the preliminaries,” DeGrado said. “Markeen broke the school record and finished runner-up. Those guys did a huge job.”
The men’s relay teams ran into some bad luck, particularly Adams.
For the distance medley relay, the team was ranked in the top eight going into the event. The top-eight teams score, but Allen ended up in 14th place. The baton was struck from Adams’s hand.
“They should have stopped the race, it happened in the first two steps and MeShach got the baton struck out of his hands,” DeGrado said. “It is what it is, lesson learned. I had the remaining legs finish out their race because we train for them to run these races.”
For the  4x800m relay, more bad luck struck Adams. The team consisted of Adams, Caine, Thomas Broxterman and Aaron Miller.
“Our 4×800 scored us seventh, but that wasn’t what we wanted,” DeGrado said. “MeShach had to hurdle a pileup, so once again MeShach was on the bad end of something happening.”
Also for the men, Trail Spears placed 15th in the 500m run and Connor Immenschuch took 15th in the 1-mile run.

ALTHOUGH THE women didn’t place, there were some things to celebrate.
The 4×400 relay team — Alondriah Brown, Ivori Hood, Ronzasha Taylor and Tieasha Collier — broke the school record with a 10th place finish in 3:58.30.
Brown qualified for the 60m dash, but didn’t make it out of the preliminaries.

ONE OF THE battles that every team faces at meets such as Saturday’s was muscle cramps. Albuquerque sits at 5,200 ft. above sea level.
 “You start feeling it at about 4,000 ft. We’ve run places that were about 3,000 to 3,500 ft. before,” DeGrado said. “I kind of kept myself honest and made sure we were more strength-based and we were more higher mileage because of the aerobic aspect of running at 5,000 ft. altitude. We saw a lot of people go out fast and just hit a bad wall.”
DeGrado added that running that high above sea level compared to a place like Iola is that recovery time is slower.
“At sea level you can kind of back off a bit and recover within the race. At that altitude, you’re going to suffer,” DeGrado said. “So, you hope you don’t hit the wall too soon. That was an issue with some runners on other teams. We train our runners to recover and run multiple rounds.”

THE TEAMS are now preparing for the outdoor track season.
The first meet will be the Alabama Relays in Tuscaloosa, Ala., March 20-21.
“I liked how the team progressed going into the end of the season,” DeGrado said. “We’re pretty fit and ready for outdoors. I think we’re going to roll and I’m excited to see where this takes us.”