The men’s distance medley relay team was on the brink of qualifying for the NCAA indoor championship at the tail end of the indoor track season two and a half months ago. They crushed the school record and went on to become All-Americans, but once again, it has come down to the wire for a handful of Bruins within striking distance of the NCAA West Regional championship.
This weekend, when UCLA heads to Seattle to compete in the Pac-12 conference championship, is the last chance to move up the leaderboard.
Some members of the team such as redshirt senior sprinter and jumper Kylie Price, have qualified consistently and will focus their energy on their finish within the conference.
“My sophomore and junior year I both got second place, so I think this year is my time to win in the long jump,” Price said.
But for others, the focus will be on dropping enough time to get to the meet in the first place.
Junior sprinter Jonny Moniz, senior hurdler Trinity Wilson and freshman sprinter Angie Annelus are just hundredths of a second off the 48th fastest time in their respective events, while sophomore Daniel De La Torre is a few seconds off in his 14-minute-long 5K.
In the field, sophomore jumper Efe Agege needs 11 more centimeters in the long jump and junior Reed Scale needs to add just four centimeters in the pole vault.
To do all it can for those athletes close to the top 48, the team has been reducing its work load – a welcomed process known as tapering – to make sure competitors are well-rested and prepared to do even better.
“For the last month we’ve been hitting it pretty hard, and now these last two weeks we’ve started to taper it down,” Moniz said. “We’ve slowed down on our weights a lot to get us ready to be really explosive and let all the weights come off, and our running has gone to short sprinting stuff as well, just form technique and block work.”
If athletes have been training hard all year and go through the taper process correctly, they almost always see time drops at the final meets of the year.
As Price mentioned, many of those improvements came against USC two weeks ago, but Moniz was one exception.
According to Moniz, something happened to his leg that prohibited him from finishing the way he wanted to, but he says that he’s returned to form since then, eager to qualify for the NCAA regional meet again after missing the cutoff last year.
“Not going my sophomore year was pretty depressing,” Moniz said. “But when I was a freshman, I was freaking out because I’ve never been at a meet of that kind of high level with so many high-caliber athletes.”
As it stands, his 400-meter dash is only 0.05 seconds off of the 48th fastest time in the western region, and Moniz is certain he’ll go under the 47 second barrier, which should be fast enough to get back to regionals.
It so happens that another member of the team is in a similar position. Two years ago, Wilson qualified for regionals and made it all the way to the national championship meet.
Due to an intermittent illness, she failed to do the same her junior season, but is 0.05 seconds off the 48th fastest time in her 100-meter hurdles this year.
“Last year was really hard for me because it was hard to not support my team at track meets because I wasn’t able to compete with them,” Wilson said. “This year when I’m going to practice, going over hurdles just feels like home to me and it brings peace to my day.”
Wilson said she’s been on a taper for Pac-12s since before the USC dual meet, but admitted that the team’s focus – manifested in a taper or not – is on championship season year-round.
The Pac-12 championship meet is the beginning of those playoffs, and as such could potentially be the last competition of the year for athletes. But on the teamwide scale, regardless of individual performances, they are all working toward a common goal.
“If we can win the Pac-12 championships that would be great,” Moniz said. “If we can all inspire ourselves to do a little better it actually could be possible because we all have everything it takes.”