New Format Means Busy Days For Standouts Like Prandini
By Rob Moseley
Editor, GoDucks.com
When most folks are hitting the couch after another day of the 9-to-5 grind Thursday evening, Jenna Prandini will be just getting to work. And what a workload it will be.
The NCAA Outdoor Track and Field Championships begin Wednesday in Eugene with a new format. With the exception of the multis and 10,000 meters, men’s preliminaries will be held Wednesday with finals Friday, while the women hold their preliminary rounds Thursday before wrapping up the meet with finals Saturday.
Traditionally the men’s and women’s competitions each have been stretched across all four days of the meet. Under the new format, an athlete like UO women’s standout Prandini, who could compete in as many as five events, will be extremely busy at times.
Prandini’s meet could open with the preliminary round of the 4x100-meter relay on Thursday at 4 p.m. The tempo really picks up about an hour later; the long jump finals and 100 prelims begin almost simultaneously around 5:15 p.m., with the 200 prelims an hour later, around the time finals begin for the long jump.
The 4x400 relay, a race Prandini could run if the team title is on the line, will close each day of the meet. “We’re under an extremely tight window as far as moving from event to event to event,” UO head coach Robert Johnson said.
Prandini’s finals Saturday, potentially in the 4x100, 100, 200 and 4x400, all would be separated by about 45 minutes each. It’s a hectic schedule – though not too dramatically different from a Friday night last year that packed three finals into about 90 minutes.
“You just have to take it like any other meet,” Prandini said. “You’re given the schedule, and you can’t back down from whatever. I think it’ll be fine. We have a day to recover in between, so I’m excited.”
Johnson said the Ducks have spent the last couple weeks adjusting practice plans to prepare for the competition schedule this week. He said the format could impact the makeup of relay teams; Johnson floated the idea that the men’s 4x400 team might be without open 400 contender Marcus Chambers, in favor of someone like Charles Nelson, the UO football star-turned-sprinter.
Chambers will run in the 400 prelims Wednesday at 5:30 p.m., a couple of hours before the 4x400 prelims. The 400 final is Friday at 5:35 p.m., prior to the relay final at 6:50 p.m.
“As coaches, those things are thrust upon us, so we’ve got to find out a way to be successful in that model,” Johnson said. “We’ve been tinkering and trying some things to be able to do that.”
Johnson said he’s taking a wait-and-see approach to judging the new championship meet format. He called himself initially “skeptical” of the change enacted to better highlight each team competition, but said he saw both pros and cons.
“I can see how there’s some good things to it, and I can see how there’s some bad things to it,” Johnson said.
Prandini said on a conference call last week organized by the NCAA that it will be “weird” competing without the men also in action. “We usually do everything together,” she said.
Another participant in that conference call, sprinter Trayvon Bromell of Baylor, called the new format “crazy to me.”
“It’s just a lot,” said Bromell, the returning 100-meter champion. “And then competing against people at this high level – I feel like they didn’t think about athletes and our bodies.”
The new format is not without challenges, to be sure. But it’s here this week, when the NCAA meet kicks off Wednesday at Hayward Field.
