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UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN TRACK & FIELD MEDIA CONFERENCEOctober 26, 2015Mick ByrneTHE MODERATOR: Director of Cross-Country and Track and Field Mick Byrne will have some opening comments, then take questions. COACH BYRNE: We always talk about Big Ten week feeling a little bit different than a normal competition, and as coaches, obviously we get very excited about the Big Ten Championship, and our athletes do, also. Obviously coming off performances at Adidas, we obviously wished that Adidas went better for us; it was pretty poor for both squads, but dealt with some injuries and some issues at the meet, and you gotta move forward and, again, Big Ten Championships on the men's side, we're the defending champions, and on the women's side, second last year, so probably on the women's side it's a little easier to explain what went on at Adidas. Monday night, prior to the meet Molly Hanson had an MRI, and it came back positive, and basically it's a season-ending injury, and that obviously was a huge blow going into a meet like Adidas, and once we got the bad news on Molly, we decided at that stage to redshirt Sarah Disanza, runner up at the National Championships last year, and it also made sense, we thought, to redshirt our top freshman, Amy Davis, so going into Adidas with a depleted squad like that was tough. The women that we had out there thought did a pretty good job, but when you lose three top athletes like that, it hurts. Big Ten Championships, I've also said it, it's a different beast. There are about 100 athletes in the race, so it's not as overpowering, overwhelming as Adidas, when you get almost 300 athletes across the board with so many great schools and great teams coming in for that invitational. It's a different beast. You can see your competition, you know a lot of the individuals, so hopefully our women's team will rebound and looked good the last two weeks. I mean, you have to put a meet like Adidas behind and you move forward, and obviously we have to move forward without Molly, Sarah and Amy, and we're going to do that. So the women are excited about this weekend's competition. On the men's side, a little bit more mysterious. It was kind of unexpected on the performance at Adidas and certainly a couple of injuries. Some of them easy to put your finger on, some not so easy. Some injuries below the neck, some injuries above the neck, so some things that we had to work on the last two weeks and, you know, hopefully we have and our kids are pumped up about going in there and defending our title. We certainly as a coaching staff, in getting them all pumped up, it looks like they have rebounded, and we're excited about this weekend. It looks like Michigan is certainly in the driver's seat. They had a fantastic performance at Adidas, finishing third. Other top teams are going to be Indiana and Michigan State, and I'm expecting a good run out of Illinois, but in saying that, we are the defending champions, and we're going to go in there and do everything we can to give it our best shot and defend our title. Q. Mick, coaches oftentimes kinda know what to expect from their teams. It sounds like you are not sure what to expect on Sunday? COACH BYRNE: If you asked me again Monday before Adidas, we saw some great things in workouts and, you know, some injuries, some things just pop up and you just -- you don't know. Freshman fell off his bike, someone we expected to run at Adidas, but absolutely 100% we're going to run our top freshman, Olin Hacker at the Big Ten Championships. Fell off his bike, hurt his achilles, and it's all jacked up, and we've got to see if we can get that back in the next couple of days. But two weeks ago, if you'd asked me, I would have said he would be running and he was doing great workouts with our top guys, so you just don't know what's around the corner. No one has a crystal ball, but on paper, we have the guns. Today's Monday and anything can happen, you know? Tomorrow is another day. Q. For those who haven't gone through it, what does an athlete racing from start to finish at this level go through during the course of a race, whether it's mentally or physically? COACH BYRNE: Well, if you listen to Coach Byrne all mic'd up for the Adidas meet, you would know what Coach Byrne goes through. I can't speak for those guys when that gun goes off. You take someone like Malachy Schrobilgen, he's focused on one thing, and that's defending his individual title. Low stick, and he knows if he does his job, he gets a number one point for the team, and obviously it's about the low-scoring points. His supporting staff, Malachy -- Joe Hardy, I'm sorry and Morgan McDonald, and Morgan had a fantastic run at Adidas; he looked anxious the whole race. We talked about it after the race. It looked like he wanted to just go. He was looking left and right, looking at his teammate, Malachy, and it seemed like he just wanted to break out. We weren't quite as sharp over that last 800 meters, some of the other top athletes were, and we certainly worked on that over the next few weeks, but it was a little bit of anxious knows, it's like when is the big moves going to come and trying to be mentally ready to cover those big moves. Both Morgan and Malachy did a great job at that at Adidas, and you know our third top guy, Joe Hardy, had a tough one at Adidas, tough day at the office, and things didn't go his way. He was a little bit under the weather and we didn't know about that until half, and he was probably struggling mentally going through that race. It was, I'm letting everybody down, he knows that when he crossed that finish line, so it was a little bit of, hey, if I do my part everything will come together. We're a good enough team we got enough personnel to do that, and it doesn't matter whether you're talking about the men or the women, I think they're all thinking, hey, if I do my part, we can do pretty well, but, again, for someone like Malachy, it's all about concentration, covering moves, being in the right spot, taking the right tangents, and not getting too excited too early, because it is, obviously, an 8K race. Q. You see a lot of things. You see people crying, you see people puking, you see people doing a whole bunch of stuff. I often call it a train wreck. Why it is that way at the end of the race, during those races? COACH BYRNE: I mean, I think certainly something like this weekend, it's the Big Ten Championships. It has that championship feel about it. It's something that our kids train for ever since July 1st. It's the ecstasy of doing well. It's the disappointment of not doing well. Puking is good, and if you are puking, that means you ran hard enough, and we like that. Crying, we don't like that; no need to cry. But, you know, it's just -- so much goes into it. It's their livelihood, they do it 24/7, they do it for three seasons, year-round. They sacrifice an awful lot, and I think it's just the outpouring of emotion once they cross the line. When you run well, it's easy, when you don't run well, you know, you kinda start questioning yourself. We had to do a great coaching job, I would say, on Joe Hardy, trying to get him back and understand that's just one race; one race does not define anyone's season. Joe, when he understood that, he knew he let the team down, but it's not just on one person, it's on all seven competitors, so it's just emotion. Q. As a coach, you obviously prepare for so many different scenarios, so when something like this happens to an Olin, do you start encouraging the team to call Uber instead of using their bike, do you get 'em taxis, call friends for rides? What do you do? COACH BYRNE: This is the second or third bicycle incident in the last three or four weeks. One guy rode around, someone stole his seat; we can all imagine how uncomfortable that is. Another guy had a crash, ran into a young lady crossing the street. It's just -- you know, trying to keep them upright at this time of the year is a little bit difficult. With Olin it was just freak. You know, he actually wasn't even riding the bike. He was sitting on the bike, waiting on his girlfriend, so I have to blame the girlfriend not Olin. Q. I think this championship has been going on for 80 plus years. To have the chance of being a three-time champion, three years in a row, for Malachy Schrobilgen that would be quite an accomplishment? COACH BYRNE: Absolutely. I think we were going through the statistics. There is -- A.J. is throwing up the numbers down there. Seven athletes that have done that in the past, and two of them have been Wisconsin athletes, Simon Bairu and Olin's dad, Tim Hacker. When you think about that and the number of years the meet has been going on, it's an incredible feat, if he can pull this off. I'm sure there are three or four guys out there, Mason Ferlic from Michigan, Matt McClintock from Purdue, and maybe Caleb Rhynard from Michigan State could upset him, or try to upset him, but Malachy is always up for the challenge. Chicago is his hometown. There's going to be a lot of people from Oak Park at the meet, his whole entire high school will be there, parents, grandparents, a lot of friends and family, so he's running at home, in Chicago. He's a little upset that the Cubs are not going to the World Series, so he's a man with a mission right now. THE MODERATOR: Anything else for Coach? Thanks, Mick. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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