Mike Stevenson Meet Quotations

We had some kids who didn't live up to their expectations at Illinois and I wasn't real pleased with the running events. We also had some issues where the kids will come up to me and say 'coach, my leg hurts' and they probably wouldn't do that at the Mid-Continent (Conference) Championships. I call it the Lee Calhoun hangover. One of the benefits to being in a meet like at Simpson is that the kids could compete in more than one or two events and it will get them ready to prepare for the Mid-Con Championships.

It's our home meet so we want to put our best foot forward to score as many points as we can.

The original plan was to go to Purdue (University) this weekend, but they changed their meet to last weekend so we changed it to Northern Iowa. We were going to be close to Notre Dame, which is a very high caliber meet to send some people like (seniors) Aubrey (Martin) and Jen (Gilson) to give them a little better competition.

Traditionally it's a pretty good meet and it depends on what teams go. Northern Iowa itself is a very good team and they have a bunch of All-Americans on their team.

We're average and we're not super ready but we had enough practice that we should be ready. For the most part we will compete well and we should be Ok. We're competing against some major programs and if we finish in the middle of the road, I'll be content with that. If we competed as well as we could, I'll be happy, and even if we do win the meet and the kids didn't do what they were suppose to do, then I'll be disappointed.

We're going to try to knock off a little rust with a high quality meet with good competition like (University of) Alabama and Brigham Young University. We don't have enough people to run the women's distance relay and we have issues with kids competing in more than one event being so close to each other they might get tired out.

We're real happy for her, especially for the shot put. (Gilson) threw real far in the first meet and is back up where she needs to be. The weight throw has some improving to do; she kind of declined on it and is real frustrated. She has been watching film on her technique and checking to see if there is anything visible to see if she has some kind of problem throwing it.

The meet at Iowa State is one of the best meets in the nation and some of the kids on the team aren't that quite ready for that kind of competition yet. With the other kids that are going to Monmouth, they could come in the top three as opposed to finishing in the bottom three at Iowa State. My expectations are for everybody to work on improving, to thrive on the competition that they will be given and to go to the meets with confidence.