Indoor Track Recap

Wheaton College may have many stellar athletics arenas, but an indoor track — or an ice hockey rink for that matter — is noticeably absent. While the track at McCully stadium may be nice, it isn’t much fun to run when the temperatures drop below freezing, and anyone who has ever run the track in the SRC will have noticed that it is nowhere near the 400m of a standard track.
In light of this, indoor track tends to take a backseat to the outdoor season. Head coach Scott Bradley admits, “Our primary goals are outdoors. However,” he cautions, “that doesn’t mean that we don’t try to do as well as we can [indoors].” This year, that translated into a very well performance.
This winter was a good one for the Thunder track teams, as the women upset last year’s National Champions, Illinois Wesleyan University, and captured the CCIW conference title, shocking everyone in the conference by doing so. The men’s team finished fourth in the conference, but managed to send two athletes to the NCAA DIII Championship Meet: junior Sola Olateju in the triple jump and sophomore Leif Van Grinsven in the heptathlon.
In short, even though the track teams may not be primarily focused on indoor meets, they still performed very well at them. Hopefully for Thunder fans, this year’s success will carry over into next year’s indoor season for both the men and women. And maybe, if they keep succeeding in the winter, they may eventually convince the school to give them a true indoor track of their own.