In response to the condensing of her team’s conference meet into one day instead of two, senior captain Samantha Baer said her role as a leader involves communicating with and encouraging the team, even through obstacles.

“(I am) encouraging them that we’ve been doing this all season,” Baer said. “We’ve been training with multiple events every meet because our team is small, so this is something our team can for sure handle and it’s almost in my opinion for the SLP team in general an advantage because we’re ready for this where other teams haven’t been doing multiple events.”

According to head coach Christine Tvrdik, a weather-related cancellation the first day of the team’s conference meet May 17 caused the meet to take place all on the scheduled second day of competition May 18.

“It’s set up to be a two-day meet, so there’s prelims and finals, but because of the weather yesterday with lightning and thunder, we legally cannot compete. Instead of having a rain day, they condensed it to one day, so today now it’s kind of a long day and it gets condensed a little bit,” Tvrdik said.

Baer said the cancellation impacts Park more profoundly than other schools due to the size of the team.

“For us it was kind of a big factor because our team is very small so we’re only taking like 25 people on average for girls and boys, so this makes us have to perform extremely well on this day,” Baer said. “With low numbers we have higher expectations to perform better in more events than other teams have.”

Junior Katelyn Lanoux said the meet cancellation works against herself and other Park athletes who run in multiple events.

“The meet combined into one day gives the advantage to the larger schools because they have less multi-event athletes,” Lanoux said. “As for us, we have (many) multi-event athletes, so (others and myself) have to run our races twice or cram their field events into small windows of time between their running events.”

Tvrdik said the team is stronger than past years going into the end of the season.

“I’m really happy with (the season so far). This is my fifth season as the head coach and this is probably the most competitive team we’ve had,” Tvrdik said. “Every year it’s seemed to get a little bit better and I think kids are pretty committed to it.”
According to Baer, the team finished third behind Bloomington Jefferson and Chaska, fulfilling its goal of placing in the top four. The team now prepares to compete at Sections May 30 and June 1.