ASU Track and Field: Sun Devils remain motivated through consecutive canceled seasons

(Photo courtesy Sun Devil Athletics)

As a fifth-year senior for the Sun Devils cross country and track team, Megan Reniewicki said her 2020 indoor track season, the last full season she competed, was the best she had ever felt as a runner. and as a person with her latest 3000 meter race on Feb. 29 being a 9:34.03 time. When the COVID-19 pandemic first hit, leading to the NCAA’s cancellation of all spring sports championships, Reniewicki said the cancelation was understandable, yet still an adverse situation for her.

“I had been running the fastest and felt the fittest that I had ever felt before,” Reniewicki said of her indoor track season. “I just had a little bit of newfound confidence, which is something that I had always struggled with. So I felt really good as a runner.

“Having everything come to such an abrupt stop from COVID was really hard but in the end, was super understandable.”

After the cancellation of all spring Pac-12 sporting events March 14, Reniewicki said that though the cancellation was abrupt and a lot to wrap her head around at first, she found a way to make the best of the situation by realizing the good in her personal life.

“It was kinda hard coming off of that high from how well I felt like I was doing in indoor, which I felt like was an indicator of how outdoor was going to go,” Reniewicki said. “So it was very hard when I felt like I had all this momentum and then I hit a brick wall. But at the end of the day I was in such a good situation with my own life and how fortunate I was with my personal life.”

Arizona State head track and field coach Dion Miller said the canceling of the spring track and field season was abrupt. Less than half of the spring 2020 season was played due to the pandemic.

“We’re a training sport, not a playing sport,” Miller said. “It’s a lot of training to get ready for an Olympic sport, so you just really feel bad for our kids. But, health and safety is first and foremost with the virus, so there was really nothing we could do about it.”

Sophomore runner Vinny Mauri said his first cross country season with the team during the fall of 2019 was a great season for him, with his personal record in the 5000 meter race at 14:54. Still, there remain improvements to be made, which drives the Sun Devil team as they train this fall.

Like Reniewicki, Mauri said he felt his indoor track season last winter was successful, but the cancelled outdoor season left a lot to be desired.

“We had a pretty much like a 48-hour window to be upset,” Mauri said. “But with distance running, that’s what happens in distance running, there’s always a curveball thrown your way. So, we just kind of took it to our advantage and we’ve been training hard ever since.”

During the unprecedented off-season, the athletes had to train for whatever season was coming next by themselves, off-campus. With this training, both Mauri and Reniewicki said they used running and training as a way to cope and feel better about the situation that the pandemic put themselves in. With distance running requiring no equipment to train, Reniewicki said her training remained convenient for her, no matter where she was.

“One of my coping mechanisms is to get into deeper training and have running be an outlet,” Reniewicki told Cronkite Sports. “I can just go for my run and whatever is making me feel anxious or overwhelmed at the moment is just gone in that hour run.”

While the university was shut down, Miller said the track and field coaching staff as a whole had to get creative with keeping up communication with the athletes over Zoom. According to Miller, there are 60 event coaches that all had to communicate among each other while also keeping the athletes accountable, too.

“We gave the kids kind of a vacation period of training where we just tried to stay in shape with different training ideas,” Miller said. “We tried to encourage them to stay active. Once things started to kind of open back up, we tried to give them some voluntary workouts to do on their own to get them as far back as returning to play when they came back to campus.”

After the spring outdoor track season was cancelled in March, the Pac-12 sports season was planned to go on in the fall as planned. But on August 11, news was released that the Pac-12 would be having no fall sports. Mauri said that though there was a plan for a season all summer, he saw that there was a possibility they might not have a season.

“We were just kind of waiting for [the season] to happen even though there were a few different hints that maybe wouldn’t have a cross country season,” Mauri said. “Realistically, once it happened, it took awhile for people to accept it. But again… stuff happens like that.”

Being a college athlete during the COVID-19 pandemic, has led to there being an increase in the motivation of how future seasons will be spent, Mauri said.

“It definitely lit a fire in a lot of us,” Mauri said. “So I think it kind of opened our eyes to ‘hey, we had a few seasons taken away. Like, we can’t get that back. So we just got to just be that much better for the next couple of, or even the last seasons, for some of the older athletes here.’”

As for whatever season comes next for the cross country and track team at ASU, Miller said the team will be training despite not knowing the landscape of what the rest of this school year will look like for them.

“We’re just going to be training hard,” Miller said. “Right now, our kids are in the position where we’re in the beginning stages of just trying to make sure we’re crossing our T’s and dotting our I’s and getting everybody prepared for the winter.”