Cougars Lack Key Ingredient

There seems to be a break in the Long Crimson Line.

It’s hard to disguise the hole in the men’s track team at Washington State University this spring. In the year’s first listing of top times out of the Pacific-10 Conference, the Cougars don’t have a runner among the top 20 in either the 800 or 1,500 meters, and no one higher than eighth in any of the long distance races.

This is a little like McDonald’s being fresh out of burgers.

“It’s something we’re very conscious of,” said WSU coach Rick Sloan. “We need to bolster our distance-running corps on both the men’s and women’s sides.”

Yet of the nine high school and junior college men and women who have signed letters of intent to join the Cougars next year, only Angelita Green of Long Beach, Calif., runs anything longer than 400 meters on the track.

Only three times in the last 27 years have the Cougars men failed to win at least one Pac-10 title at a distance of 800 meters or up - and one of those years was 1993, when WSU didn’t compete in the conference meet because of Pac-10 sanctions.

The other two times - 1996 and 1981 - the Cougars were “between Kenyans,” which is sort of the case now. Simon Kamau, a sophomore from Nairobi, is WSU’s fastest half-miler with a 1:54.33 best this season, but has yet to establish himself on the conference level. Bernard Lagat, one of WSU’s most versatile and accomplished runners, finished his outdoor eligibility last spring.

According to Sloan, “The door is still open in Kenya - we just need somebody to walk through it.”

He said two Kenyan distance runners gave the Cougars verbal commitments to attend school last fall “but that fell through at the last minute.” He also said the Cougars were in the hunt for David Kimani, who last fall won the NCAA cross country championship for South Alabama.

“We had an opportunity to hook up with that guy, but he wasn’t running that good at the time,” Sloan acknowledged. “I think we speculated wrong.”

Big shots

Maybe they weren’t the shots heard ‘round the world, but Joachim Olsen and Shana Ball made some noise for the University of Idaho last weekend.

In a weekend of shot putting unprecedented in these parts, Olsen and Ball qualified for the NCAA championships with efforts that shattered both UI school records.

Olsen, a sophomore from Denmark, broke Mitch Crouser’s 19-year-old school mark by more than 5 inches last Saturday in Eugene with a toss of 64 feet, 11-1/4 inches. It was the longest collegiate put of the spring for exactly one day until SMU’s Janus Robberts - who nosed out Olsen for first at the NCAA Indoor in March - reached 65-0 the following afternoon at the Texas Relays.

Ball, a senior from McMinnville, Ore., had an even more remarkable breakthrough the day before at the UNLV Invitational. Having already added 3 feet to her personal best this season, Ball tacked on another three with a 51-2-3/4 blast - almost a foot longer than Jill Wimer’s old school record.

She’s only the fourth collegiate woman from this area to top 50 feet - following Wimer, Eastern Washington’s Nancy Kuiper and WSU’s Georgette Reed. In addition, Cora Aguilar topped 50 after leaving the Community Colleges of Spokane for Oregon.

Last laps

In part of the USATF dual-meet series, CCS will take on North Idaho, Lane and Whitworth in head-to-head action Saturday at Spokane Falls beginning at 10 a.m. Most of the rest of the area’s athletes will be at the Mt. San Antonio College Relays in Walnut, Calif., though EWU will send its men and women to take on Washington and Portland State in Seattle.

Eric Boyd, EWU’s decathlon hope, will take a run at an NCAA qualifying mark today and Friday at Azusa Pacific. The provisional standard is 7,100 points; Boyd has scored 6,908 this spring, a school record.

CCS has lost sophomore middle distance standout Jenni Saling for the rest of the spring as she needs to retake a biology class. The NWAACC leader at 800 (2:13.84) and 1,500 (4:37.02) will compete unattached and continues to receive recruiting attention from a number of four-year schools.

Spokane’s Kari McKay ran a leg for the U.S. team last Sunday at the Seoul Women’s Ekiden in South Korea. She clocked an opening 6-kilometer leg of 20 minutes, 47 seconds - the fastest of three 6Ks on the U.S. team, which finished eighth among 16 teams in the 42.19-kilometer relay won by Russia.

The letter writer in last Sunday’s paper who chose John van Reenen over current senior Ian Waltz as WSU’s best-ever combination shot-discus thrower has a point. But if you put the tape on it, van Reenen’s two best throws as a Cougar measure out at 273-10, Waltz at 275-2-3/4. It’s a game of inches.