Longwood's Newest Team Preparing for Inaugural First Season

The Longwood Track and Field team will begin their first ever division I season for men’s and women’s starting in February. The lancers are led by head coach Brooke Craig and assistant coach Rob Gritzer. The decision to bring the new program in was made on March 21, and the teams will be placed in the Big South Conference as the eighth women’s team, and the seventh men’s team. This will not be the first time the lancers will get experience in track meets however. Coach Craig stated “When I first took over in 2019, we were already doing track meets. Just a small four meets and we weren’t able to compete at the championship level.” 

The schedule has been set for the spring and the lancers will compete in two indoor competitions and four outdoor competitions. The two indoor competitions are the Liberty Open on Feb. 3, and the Virginia Tech Challenge Feb. 17-18. The four outdoor competitions begin with the Fred Hardy Invite at the University of Richmond on March 15. They will run in the Dr. Jack Tom Invite the following weekend at the University of Lynchburg. The lancers will return to Lynchburg for the Craddock Terry Invite on April 12-13, and will finish their regular season the following weekend in the Wildcat Invite at Randolph College. The Big South Track and Field Championships will take place at High Point University from May 6-8.   

The lancers will immediately be eligible to compete for the conference championship and will compete in eight different races in the spring. The distances for their competitions will include the 100 meter, 200 meter, 400 meter, 800 meter, 1,500 meter, steeplechase, 5K, and the 10K. The team will add more events in the future, but will stick to the medium and long distance events for now.

The roster structures of the two teams are different. The women’s team has 17 runners and the men’s team has 22 runners. The women’s team has five freshmen, three sophomores, six juniors, and three seniors. On the other side the men’s team has a very young squad that includes ten freshmen, seven sophomores, five juniors, and not a single senior.

The recruiting process for this new program went very quickly but it was also evident to use most of the cross country team, since they are running all five distance events available and the longest sprint event out of three available. The program was approved sooner than Coach Craig was expecting so the recruitment process started late in the year back in February. The main goal was to recruit sprinters because they had to increase the roster sizes to at least 16, which would not have been possible without the sprint athletes. They also held open tryouts and will add two female and two male athletes to the team. The men’s cross country team had 17 runners this fall and 16 of them will participate for track in the spring. The women’s cross country team had 15 runners this fall and all of them will run track in the spring as well. 

One of the main difficulties the first year program is facing is funding. The team has limited scholarship offers compared to other sports here, and are also without a training facility. The lancers are currently training at Prince Edward County High School, and are hoping to strike a deal with Fuqua High School to use their unused track. Coach Craig believes that a brand new facility will cost between $2.5 million and $3.5 million.

The program is growing bigger and bigger every year. Since cross country and track and field are very similar and feature many of the same runners, they are connected as one big program. When Craig took over in January 2020, the cross country program had only 16 runners total. The cross country and track and field teams now have a combined 39 runners. The goal for the future is to build the roster size to triple digits.

There are some differences in coaching between cross country and track. Assistant coach Rob Gritzer stated “Especially this year with a group that’s so young, definitely the coaching style had to change as opposed to a group of seniors and super seniors.” Gritzer will lead the team to do more developmental exercises and to focus more on the long-term goals for the program. 

They are also still working towards figuring out which athletes will run which events. Coach Craig is still doing end of season meetings with her athletes to gauge what events they would be interested in too. Craig stated “I want them to be buying into the event that they’re participating in…if they’re not bought in on one event then maybe we shift the focus to another event.” The goal is also to spread out the sprint and distance runners for different events to give the most opportunities to score points in these events.

The team is still a work in progress for the field aspect. They have had a few athletes that expressed interest in participating in different horizontal jumping events, but that is not in the plans for this year. Since Craig and Gritzer are the only full-time coaches, it is hard to oversee a variety of different events. Craig stated “My vision is start with the running events, add in hurdles, then add in jumps, and then throws, and possibly pole vaults after that.” 

This season will be a difficult one in terms of their chances to win the Big South in year one so the main goal is to set the standard. Craig does believe that some individuals have a chance for all conference awards so they will push for those. The team’s motto for the year is to set the standard because they will be setting records for sprinting events that have never been run before at Longwood, and to set those marks high on the track as well as in the classroom.