New Deadline Forces Organizers to Sprint to Finish
By Eli Saslow
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
From her seat in the top row, Beth Shook stared down at the kind of chaos usually depicted in a "Where's Waldo?" book. Four hundred high school athletes darted around the Prince George's Sports & Learning Complex, cycling through 24 track and field events. Sixty coaches shouted instructions and blew whistles. A uniformed official cleaned pink vomit off the maroon track.
In the stands, nearly 1,000 spectators and idle athletes created a circus of their own. Three sprinters from Northwestern High School played cards. In a section of the stands directly below Shook, seven competitors played keep-away with a ball made of duct tape.
"I don't care who you are," Shook said. "There's no way you can keep your eye on all of this at once."
And on Monday night, therein lay Shook's problem: Her job description required exactly that. As the meet director for Maryland's 4A/3A East Region indoor track and field championships, Shook undertook what many coaches and officials consider perhaps the hardest job in high school sports. In one gigantic field house, she had to coordinate hundreds of athletes and dozens of events.
In February and March, indoor track season's busiest months, hundreds of high schools teams in Maryland, Virginia and the District jam into a handful of facilities for the biggest meets of the year. Because of new rules instituted in Maryland last year, Shook needed to end the 4A/3A East meet before 10 p.m. or risk cutting short a qualifier for the state championship.
"I don't even want to talk about 10 o'clock," said Shook, who also coaches track at Westlake High School in Waldorf. "Thinking about that deadline just scares me."
Shook arrived at the Prince George's track complex near FedEx Field just before 3 p.m., about an hour before the meet's scheduled start. In her car, Shook packed the race survival kit she had often relied on while running meets during the last decade: Two computers, a super-size soda, a half-dozen relay batons, a change of clothes and a few extra track jerseys. "You have to be prepared for anything," she said.
Shook walked into the building and climbed to a row of tables on the upper concourse of the field house. She settled into a cushioned chair next to William Vaughan, an experienced meet director from Baltimore who had agreed to help her. Together, they sat in front of six computers -- one that managed the scoreboard, two that operated automatic cameras at the finish line and three others for data entry.
In her head, Shook kept a checklist for the evening that she refused to write down because she feared it would overwhelm her. Even before the first race, she needed to craft specific assignments for 30 meet officials. She needed to coordinate crews to set up hurdles and remove starting blocks. Shook leaned back in her chair and rubbed her palms against her forehead. Vaughan looked at her and laughed
"Hey Beth," Vaughan said. "Do you think you can beat my meet-director record? I ran one of these things so smooth we finished before 8 o'clock."
"Eight? No way." Shook said. "I'm going to be going like crazy just hoping that we finish."
Once meets start, athletes face the reverse challenge: stave off boredom. Eighteen track teams left their schools for the 4A/3A East meet at about 2 p.m. on Monday. Those teams didn't return to their schools, in some cases, until after 11.
Yanni Davis, a junior from Suitland, spent almost eight hours laying in the bleachers before he finally ran the 800-meter race and a leg of the 4x200 relay -- less than 10 minutes of total activity. During his downtime, Davis took two naps, caught up with friends on his cellphone and played six games of Madden 2007 on his handheld PlayStation. "Even though it's an important meet, it's just boring," Davis said. "You've got to come prepared to be in here forever."
Dozens of athletes killed time by waiting in line at a snack stand inside the field house, which briefly sold out of cookies and ice cream bars. One coach, Eleanor Roosevelt's Desmond Dunham, required each athlete on his team to sit in the stands and read either a textbook or one from the library. "We consider this like a study hall," he said.
While half asleep on one plank of the plastic yellow bleachers, Laurel runner Alfonzo Diaz consented to two teammates who wanted to braid his hair. Kristen Onuoha and Matilda Amlalo, both juniors on Laurel's team, twisted locks of Diaz's shoulder-length brown hair into dozens of careful braids. It took them almost three hours.
"When are you going to be done?" Diaz asked at one point.
"Does it matter?" Amlalo said. "What else do you have to do? We've got all night."
In 2005, two Maryland high school track meets ended at about 1 a.m., forcing the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association to institute two new rules. Instead of allowing schools to enter three athletes per event, Maryland now limits schools to two athletes in each. At a meeting over the summer, Joe Sargent, the director of Maryland's indoor track committee, told meet directors to shut down meets and send athletes home by 10 p.m. -- no matter how crucial the meet.
"We had kids getting back early in the morning on a school night, and that's never going to happen again," said Sargent, the athletic director at Milford Mill Academy in Baltimore. "We'll get these meets done on time. If we don't, we'll come back and finish it up the next day."
Shook refused to consider that option. The Prince George's Sports & Learning Complex -- the area's premier venue -- is booked with 75 other track meets this year. Combined, Maryland and Northern Virginia public schools use only three other facilities for indoor track championship meets -- the Armory Track and Field Center in Baltimore and the field houses at Hagerstown Community College and George Mason University. Rescheduling would be an expensive nightmare, Shook said.
But on the track below, Shook watched one delay lead into the next. Two female sprinters showed up for a race wearing the same number. A high jumper collapsed with a cramp. An assistant coach strolled, confused, through the center of the shot put area. Twice, officials delayed the beginning of long-distance races so they could clean vomit off the track.
At 9:51 p.m., Shook clicked open a spreadsheet on her computer to re-seed a relay race because of a last-minute change. She tried to print out the new seedings, but her printer jammed. Shook had two hands inside the printer and her head on the table when she heard -- finally -- the crack of a starter pistol that signaled the beginning of the last race. Shook turned to Vaughan.
"So I lost to your record by two hours, and we barely finished before 10," Shook said. "Can you punish me or something?"
"What do you mean?" Vaughan said.
"Well," Shook joked, "maybe I should never be allowed to run one of these meets again."
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