The Rowan men’s indoor track & field team has begun building the base of a national champion contender after competing in the FastTrack Opener this past weekend.

In its first meet of the season, the team had ten individuals finish in the top five for their respective events.

The highlight of the meet was Marquise Young’s performance in the 60-meter hurdles. After originally being told Young’s prelims time was a school record at 7.82, it was determined that timers at the Ocean Breeze Complex made a mistake and the school record was taken away. Young was still able to tie for first in the finals with a time of 8.29.

“We’re still working it out,” Head Coach Dustin Dimit said. “There might be a way for us to recover the time and to actually see what it is because it was close to the school record anyway… even his time in the finals after sitting around for an extra 30 minutes while they tried to figure it out was still fifth in the country so we’re still happy with this race it’s just rough that it didn’t count for what we thought it did.”

Young was still happy with his performance though and credited his offseason work and the workouts that Assistant Coach Norm Tate has started the season off with.

“It felt good,” Young said. “With this offseason and the work I’ve been putting in in the summertime and the workouts that Coach Tate has been putting us through, I knew that I could possibly run something hot, but I never expect to run a certain time or anything. I just go out there and I just run… it felt real good to be able to run that fast this early.”

The team now will head into its winter break, having about six weeks off until another meet is on the schedule which turns out to be the most important stretch of the season.

“My expectation is for us to come back and all do better than we did the last meet,” Young said. “This is where other teams and other athletes start to slack during the winter break so this is actually one of the most important parts of our season to really put the work in to get better. At that meet when we come back is where we’ll see who worked over the break and who didn’t, but my expectation for the team is for all of us to come back better than where we left off.”

The team is set to build off of what they were able to do at this meet and last season and with Coach Tate’s foot on the gas, they will be ready when the time comes. 

“I really do think that we can go into nationals pretty deep this year especially with the workouts we’ve been doing,” Young said. “They’re very intense. All the guys that have been here before the past couple years, we’re all saying the same thing ‘Tate has never started off our season this way,’ so he kind of put his foot on the gas from the beginning so it’s good for us.”

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