Mowing, measuring and painting. Marvin Smith is sweating the little things.
Iola High’s longtime head coach spent a good part of his weekend at Iola’s Riverside Park making preparations for Thursday’s 2011 Southeast Kansas League Cross Country Meet. It will be Iola’s final competition in SEK cross country before it moves to the Pioneer League next year.
“How fitting that Iola’s last SEK meet will be on our course,” Smith said. It’s Smith’s final season at the IHS cross country program helm. Smith announced his plans to retire from coaching and teaching in May.
The SEK League meet begins at 4 p.m. Thursday. The junior varsity girls’ race leads off followed by races for junior varsity boys, varsity girls and varsity boys. The girls’ races are 2.5-miles long and the boys’ races are 3.1-miles long.
What makes the Iola course unique — the ups and downs on the dikes surrounding the park, the winding around and through trees of the park, and between the ball diamonds — is good and bad, according to Smith.
“Man, our course is a spectator-friendly one. Parents, grandparents and anyone coming to the meet will be able to see the runners almost the whole race. With a little bit of movement, they can track the runners all the way,” Smith said.
“At a lot of courses, you see runners start the race. then they disappear from view. then you see them, then they are gone for a long period.”
Despite the fondness of the Iola High home course, Smith admits it is not the greatest. He said the SEK races will follow the same routes that the IHS Doc Stiles Invitational runs each year at the park.
“Dennis Harper first organized the Doc Stiles meet in honor of Iola’s longtime coach in 1977. Dennis laid out the course and we still run some of the same course. We’ve changed the start and finish lines because of the volume of runners,” Smith said.
“But we really don’t have a great place for runners to just get out and run on long straight aways. The course is flat and winds and winds so it seems like you’re running a much longer race.”
Thursday’s SEK races begin on the south side of the park’s dike. Runners have about 700 yards of race before charging up the dike into the park at the east end. The only hills Iola’s course has are the ups and downs of the dike around the park. Runners will run on top of the dike during parts of the race.
Chanute High’s boys and girls are favored to capture both varsity team titles. The Blue Comet teams were champions at the IHS Doc Stiles Invitational on Sept. 22. Labette County is the defending boys’ race champion and Pittsburg comes in as the reigning girls’ champion.
Two-time SEK individual champion Roman Yocham, IHS senior, is not favored to defend his cross country crown Thursday. Yocham has Labette County High’s Drew Baum, Chanute High’s Trevor Summers and Carl Stinson of Independence High challenging that top place.
“Baum has been winning the meets Roman was winning last year. Roman had a good race last week at Independence,” Smith said.
Yocham led the Mustangs to second place two years in a row. Smith said anything can and seems has happened at the SEK meet and with that, “we have a chance to win if things line up right for us. Our kids will have to run well.”
