Good effort led to great results for the Queen’s track and field team last weekend at the Super Saturday Series hosted by the University of Ottawa. The team brought home seven medals including three golds.
The Gaels had gold medal performances by Rachel Boyle in the triple jump, Clay Patterson in the 1000m and Alecia Kallos in the 600m. Boyle improved her career best by 19 cm, clearing 10.84m. Both Patterson and Kallos were challenged by opponents in their races but managed to pull through to grab golds.
Gaels head coach Melody Torcolacci said the team had a good showing for the first meet of the season races.
“It was a solid opening meet,” she said. “The results were of good quality. They’re going to get better as the season goes on. It shows that there’s going to be some excitement later on in the season.”
The holidays were not necessarily a break for the track and field team. Some Gaels participated in a meet in New York in early December and many of the athletes have been dedicated to training programs over the holidays. Torcolacci said the Gaels’ commitment to these programs was obvious in their achievements in Ottawa.
“They’ve been working hard over the Christmas break,” she said. “They were given a training program to do while they were away. It looks like pretty much everyone did some quality work.”
Much of the Gaels’ training is done at RMC over the winter months when the cold keeps athletes indoors.
“We have access to the RMC track so that helps a lot” she said. “It would be virtually impossible without the track right now to do a lot of good quality training, especially on the sprints and jumps side.”
The Gaels use these meets to prepare for the OUA and CIS championships, which take place at the end of February and beginning of March. Torcolacci said that these meets are extremely important in preparing the athletes for their postseason and different methods are tested to improve their results.
“Basically all of our meets are what we would call preparatory meets, so they allow us to do different events [and] athletes to experiment with things,” she said. “[We’re] asking them to try a different strategy, so sometimes things don’t necessarily always go perfectly but they’re all meant to build towards the championships.”
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