The Rowan men’s indoor track & field team continued their impressive start to the season last Friday, Jan. 28, at the Great Dane Invite at Albany. Although there was no team scoring, they had multiple personal best throughout the day. 

The top performer of the day for the Profs was freshman Amara Conte in the 500 meters. It was initially believed that Conte set an indoor Division III record with a time of 1:03.71 but, afterward it was found that his time was the second-all-time record due to a record from years ago that the coaches association missed. 

“Still something to be proud of,” Head Coach Dustin Dimit said. “That is what we expected him to do. We even told him what the record was and thought he could break it, but we told him after so he wasn’t trying to break it.”

Conte reiterated his coach’s comments and stated he usually never ran the 500 meters beyond just using it for training.

“It’s an extra 100 meters and it helps with endurance so the initial goal was just to use it as training,” Conte said. “I went into it not expecting much and running that time just proves that the training we do at practice every day really pays off and has given me a confidence boost.”

Conte took home New Jersey Athletic Conference (NJAC) Track Athlete of the Week honors for the second straight week and teammate freshman Nana Agyemang took home NJAC Rookie of the Week for the second straight week as well. These top performances are ones Coach Dimit believes they can keep up, with the proper work.

“Just keep putting in the hard work, both on the track and in the weight room,” Coach Dimit said. “We expect, like every season, that we’ll all be running faster at the end of the season.” 

Conte had a similar response when talking about how he will build off of his fast start to the season.

“It was basically a huge boost of confidence and showed that my body is stronger than I thought it was,” Conte said. “I’ve been putting in a lot of work at practice and coach has told me to try and be more aggressive in my first 100 meters, and now I know I can do that so I will continue to work on that to help put myself in the best position for, not only myself but for the team.”

Coach Dimit also mentioned the hard work of Agyemang who so far this season has competed in the 60-meter dash, the 200 meters, the 4×400 relay and the long jump. 

“Yes, those events can prepare him for others and he will be in the 4×400 in future, bigger meets,” Coach Dimit said. “He didn’t jump last week and he won’t run the 60-meter dash this coming week. We try to rotate out some of them so that he doesn’t do too much but since we do not have an indoor practice facility we do use some of these early meets as workouts for future events.” 

The team is currently at 17 in the National rankings, sliding down eight spots from last-weeks rankings and trailing behind ranked 16 Wisconsin-Stout. The men also rank number one in the Metro Region. 

Coach Dimit said that they will send half of the team to Reading, Pennsylvania this week for the Alvernia Plex Shootout and the other half will go to Ithaca, NY for the Ithaca Bomber Invite.

Both meets will be held on Saturday, Feb. 5, with the Alvernia Plex Shootout starting at 9:30 a.m. and the Ithaca Bomber Invite beginning at 10 a.m. 

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