Lancer track teams take bronze in finals
By Ryan Rogers
Sports Editor
March 12, 2008
 The University of Windsor Lancers track and field teams both returned from Montreal last weekend with third-place finishes in the Canadian Interuniversity Sports championships. The Lancers men’s team scored 60 points, while Guelph won with 66 points and Calgary placed second with 63 points. The women’s team scored 80.5 points to trail Guelph, who won with 96.5 points, and Western who placed second with 90 points.
The men’s team’s dream for the championships were dealt a heavy blow due to a mishap during the men’s 1,500-metre run. Lancer racers Matt Sinclair and Andrew Coates got momentarily tied up with one another, causing Sinclair to topple. The slowdown cost both players from scoring any team points in the race, with Sinclair failed to finish and Coates crossed the finish line in ninth place.
While both racers have been contending for top-three finishes in the 1,500-metre run all season, they didn’t score due to the mix up. Where a first-place finish is worth 10 points, second place is worth eight, third place is worth six, and finishes from fourth to eighth are worth five, four, three, two and one points each, had Sinclair and Coates ranked in the top five, the Lancers might have been able to earn the necessary points to cover the six-point spread that separated them from the first-place Guelph team.
Track and field head coach Dennis Fairall said, “We were third by just six points. We had an unfortunate mishap…our two guys tripped each other up, and one went down and didn’t finish. That cost us valuable points.”
Fairall lamented, “If you look at one thing, that definitely hurt us the most.”
Coates regrouped and showed that he still had plenty in the tank in his next race, the 3,000-metre run, where he placed first overall, followed in third by his teammate Dave Weston. Weston took third a mere one-hundredth of a second ahead of Alex Genest, from Sherbrooke, earning imperative points for the team.
Overall, the men took 19 of a possible 39 points in the men’s 3,000-metre race as Andrew Aguanno and Deng Marial also placed in the top eight.
The Lancers rode into Montreal coming off an outstanding regional performance against the Guelph team in the Ontario University Athletics provincial championships two weeks ago, where both the men’s and women’s placed first overall.
But the Lancers couldn’t beat Guelph twice in back-to-back competitions. “It was just the way things factored out,” said Fairall. “At Nationals, you have teams that can take points away from us in our strong points. It’s not necessarily that they (Guelph) came back, but we couldn’t respond to their field performances. In the pentathlon, shot put, weight throw, they had a very good meet, and our guys, we didn’t have enough people in the field to overcome the challenge they brought on,” said Fairall.
As for the women’s team, they were riding high off of their outstanding achievements from the provincial championships, and it was going to be difficult for them to capture lightning in a bottle twice. “It was so emotional at OUs that they overachieved, and to ask them to overachieve again was impossible,” said Fairall. “To expect that again from everybody, we knew going in on the women’s side it was going to be a really stiff challenge from Western and Guelph.”
As of Feb. 12, the Lancers women’s track team was ranked fourth in Canada, behind Guelph (1), Western (2) and Saskatchewan (3). For them to outperform both Guelph and Western during the provincial meet was a major accomplishment.
“There were twenty-two teams at nationals, and to be third out of twenty-two, is very good,” said Fairall.
Fairall said that there were a lot of positives in the season, including the performances of his fifth-year seniors and the emergence of some strong rookies. “We had some real positive performances, but needed some more depth and we’ll work on that in the off-season,” said Fairall.
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