Feature: Mastodon T&F Squads Gaining Steam With Each Passing Season
2/28/2024 10:45:00 AM | Women's Track and Field, Men's Track and Field
The Purdue Fort Wayne women’s and men’s track and field squads took steps forward this past weekend at the 2024 Horizon League Indoor Championships in Youngstown, Ohio.
The women improved their point total from 77 a year ago to 126 this season, which elevated them from fourth place in 2023 to third this season.
For the men, who are only in their fifth season of competition as a program, and fourth within the Horizon League, theirs has been a steady progression from scoring 31 points in 2021 to 63 points last weekend and picking up multiple individual event titles.
Mastodon Director of Track and Field and Cross Country Alex Carradine certainly is happy with that growth, however, his excitement may be second to that of the counselors within the Purdue Fort Wayne Admissions Office.
Carradine has been assigned the tasks of not only fielding competitive track and field, as well as cross country, squads for both men and women but in doing so, he secondarily bolsters the number of Mastodon students through his recruiting an abundance of student-athletes.
“On any given year,” Carradine explained, “we are going to fluctuate between 80 and 90 (student-athletes) in our men’s and women’s programs.”
As the ever-improving results demonstrate, Carradine and his coaching staff of six have prioritized finding the highest quality of student-athletes among those 80 to 90 students.
“It starts over the summer,” Carradine explained of the process of building each of the programs. “You try to prioritize who you contact first, and you think about the conference that we compete in, and which areas can we be successful based on our facilities and our staff.”
One might feel that in a sport like track, which is obviously time-based or distance/height-based results, it would be fairly easy to figure out which athletes to recruit. After all, when Mastodon sophomore middle-distance runner Harrison Niswander runs a 1:52.80 in the 800 meters, that time beats 1:53.80 every time. However, Carradine said that he and his staff go much deeper in their analysis of each prospect rather than simply looking at their times.
“You have to be willing to develop athletes,” Carradine said. “You can’t only try to have an athlete who is that state champion or is the top eight at the state meet. You have to be willing to look at the meet results, the newspaper results, maybe it’s an athlete who was one spot out of making it to regionals but is a three-sport athlete who only comes out for track a couple of times per year.”
Sort of like Ezra Lewellen, who was a star football player at small-school Pioneer High School in the corn-engulfed burg of Royal Center, just north of Logansport.
Lewellen took first this weekend in the 60 meters, placed third in the 200 meters, and was part of a school record-setting 4X400 relay that also placed third.
"Some of our best men athletes,” Carradine said, “were athletes who have developed quite a lot over the years. In the beginning, you could have never seen that happen, but when you saw how they worked in person, it’s not a surprise that they became who they did.”
Carradine and his staff put in the work all year to find those talented athletes such as sophomore Ali Sparks, who was named the Horizon League Outstanding Performer in field events this weekend after winning the shot put, as well as senior distance runner Madison King, who was the meet’s Most Outstanding Performer in running events, after winning both the 3,000 and 5,000-meter races.
“It’s definitely a great recruiting tool,” Carradine said of the Fieldhouse. “I tell our recruits that it ‘Always 70 degrees and sunny in the Fieldhouse!’”
“We definitely look at the athletic background of the athlete,” Carradine continued. “Have they only been a track and field athlete? Or have they been in multiple sports? At least for me, we also look at the consistency of performance.
“It can be really enticing to only look at someone’s best performance, but we have to know, with the law of averages, what does your second-best day look like? What about your third-best day?”
For the Mastodon men’s program, Carradine is the one person who knows everything there is to know about the program since its inception.
He came to Fort Wayne in 2018 as an assistant coach to help start the program in the 2019-20 academic year, only to have that first season interrupted by a global pandemic.
“It was a really difficult time,” Carradine said.
He was promoted in 2020 and has since had to build the program from its inception.
“The men’s program holds a very special place in my heart,” Carradine said. “A lot of work has gone into creating it.
“It is hard to start from nothing.”
The Mastodon programs have had to come a long way, and having a magnificent training and competition facility in the Lutheran Health Fieldhouse certainly helps in attracting those student-athletes.
“It’s definitely a great recruiting tool,” Carradine said of the Fieldhouse. “I tell our recruits that it ‘Always 70 degrees and sunny in the Fieldhouse!’”
~ Feel The Rumble ~
