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JAMAL THALJIPreserving order at prep track meets takes extensive planning, volunteers, luck.
It was chaos.
There was no help running the field events. There weren't enough tape measures for jumping pits. The races were inefficiently run. It took organizers up to 10 minutes to stage each running heat.
There may be no more difficult high school sporting event to put on than a track and field meet. On that night in 1996, the hapless organizers of a meet in Pinellas County were proving just that.
Wesley Chapel boys track coach Brian Colding remembers it well. Colding was an assistant at River Ridge at the time, and he wanted only what all track coaches want: to get the kids home before midnight.
"They just said if you have a better way of doing it, have at it," Colding said. "So we did it."
The River Ridge coaches took over staging and running the finals of another school's meet.
By 10 p.m., they were headed home.
So, what can go wrong at a track meet?
"Basically," Colding said, "everything."
The logistics are daunting: 17 girls events, 17 boys events. Dozens of buses, more than 100 competitors. Usually on a school day.
"The average football game lasts three hours, your basketball game lasts an hour and a half," Wharton girls track coach Wes Newton said. "A big track meet will start at 1 p.m. and it will end about 9 p.m."
Anything can, and has, gone wrong. Bad weather can waste hours. A rain and lightning delay forced a three-hour postponement of a region meet at Sanford Seminole in 1999. Gulf coach Dean Lofton's girls got home at 2:30 a.m. on a school day.
"I just told them to stay home, that they could take a half day," Lofton said. "I didn't know if I could actually make that call."
Equipment failures can sabotage meets. Whether it is the computerized timing system at the finish line or an unsafe jump pit or a poorly patched asphalt track, if it can go wrong, it will.
Ridgewood girls track coach Sue Vien remembers when she lost an athlete to a high jump pit.
"She landed in the pit and we only saw her ankles," she said. "There was just a big old crater in the pit that absolutely swallowed her up. We had to go in there and pull her out."
Something as serious as an unsafe pit can lead to the cancellation of that event. Equipment failings can mean having to rerun an entire race. The advent of fully automatic timing has allowed meets to time races with the same accuracy as the state meet - if the computer is working.
"You'd run the race and after the race is going on you realize, whoops, the machine didn't catch them," Newton said. "So you have to stop and run the same race over again."
But the most common error is human.
The complications are endless, from the seeding of heats to the measuring of distances to the timing of finishes. At seeded meets, coaches are required to submit their athletes' times and distances in advance.
"I've been to meets where my entries weren't in, and I'm like, "I know I sent my information in,' " Pinellas Park boys coach Stacy Simmons said. "That's one thing that can happen, or we didn't pay. Some coaches will not let you compete if you don't pay. Or a team putting in false times or distances they didn't throw or jump, and you have coaches complaining because they know it's false, so you have bickering amongst the coaches.
"Man, there's some crazy stuff that happens. It never stops."
What happens if coaches forget to submit their athletes entirely? At computer-run meets, the heat sheets can't be changed at the last second. One morning four years ago, Seminole girls coach John Bordeaux was setting up for a meet when a bus pulled up.
A bus full of athletes, dressed and ready to go - except their coaches had forgotten to enter them.
"They thought they could come that day and get in and came over on a bus," said the retired coach.
So what's an organizer to do? The only fair thing - to the teams that did things right.
"There wasn't anything I could do," Bordeaux said. "Except not let them in."
Running a meet takes something akin to the modern military: a highly trained, highly motivated, all-volunteer force.
"You can coordinate a meet but you need help everywhere, especially when you do something big," Simmons said. "You need to worry about concessions, you need someone to coordinate the entries from teams, to set the heat sheets up, you need to have timers, you need to have people to work the field events and just trying to get people to help you is tough."
How many volunteers does it take to run a track meet? Colding counts the ways.
"You've got 17 different events, six field events, you've got to have workers at every one of those," he said. "A raker at two of those pits, at least a couple of people to put the bar back up at the pole vault and high jump. A marker and a guy to pull the tape at the shot and discus. Then an official at every event calling every name. You've got to have 16 people just to run the field events effectively.
"Then you need timers or spotters, anywhere from three to eight people. Then you need a finish line judge and a stager. There's another 10 total. Right there you're at 26 adults just running a track meet. That doesn't include the announcer."
Volunteers can expect to give up an entire day, and night.
"You have to find volunteers who are willing to give up three, four, five hours of their time to help," Lofton said. "You kind of run out of friends when it comes time to get someone to do that on a Friday night."
Out of friends? Try relatives. River Ridge girls coach Dave Heywood put them to work at the finish line this month at the River Ridge Invitational.
"You know who was at the finish line?" Heywood said. "My dad, my uncle, my cousin, a brother-in-law, and then two boys' parents. So it was the Heywood family reunion, and in the concession stand was my wife and my mother-in-law."
Linda Jacobsen is the consummate volunteer. Her daughter Samantha and son Steven run for River Ridge, and that's what got her involved. Two years later, she has gone from team mom to the county's (un)official scorer.
She has scored every major meet in the county, using her laptop, Microsoft Excel and accrued vacation time. She submits results to flrunners.com so everyone can access them on the Internet. She's a monitor on flrunners.com message boards. Her handle: bookie.
Why does she do it?
"It needed to be done," she said.
Officiating is another headache. Most meets, even postseason ones, are run by the coaches. Rare is the meet that has certified officials. So coaches and volunteers interpret the rules and make the tough calls.
"Unlike a basketball game where you can go to West Coast (Officials Association) to get two officials, we in track do not have the luxury of an officiating group," Newton said. So if meets are such a production, why do coaches do them? Simmons said it's for the same reason his former coach at Dunedin, Randy Lightfoot, did it decades ago.
"He always took us to all the meets just to experience how track should be," Simmons said. "Now I find that interest in track is starting to fade away. It's hard, but we still want to provide the (kids) with some quality meets, to have the chance to win some medals and to have fun with the sport."
Running a smooth meet has become a point of pride for coaches willing to take on big meets. "What I tell kids when you host a meet, it's a pride thing," Colding said. "You want everyone to say, "That was a great meet.' "
No one wants to come back to a poorly run meet. Said Colding: "You hear all the time coaches who say, "I'm not coming back to this meet.' "
The secret is organization, coaches said. Gather volunteers, train the inexperienced ones and set a time limit. No matter what, the meet must finish.
"You've just got to keep firing that gun," Heywood said.