Montville Track Gunning For Victory

Nine in the morning outside Montville High, and the track team starts loping up and down the mushy football field for their warm-up exercises.

The morning is cold and smeared with a wet fog. It's spring break for the Montville schools ,so some of the team members are on vacation, but plenty of others are  starting the day with some training.

Though the athletes are competing in events as different as the 100-meter dash and the 3,200 — along with field events, each of which requires radically different training regimens - they start their practices together with a lengthy series of exercises. These include skips and kicks, and fancier footwork as well as sprints.

Joel Finnegan, the girls’ head coach, explains that it has only been in recent years that the team has taken up the dynamic exercises, and that previously the coaches had everyone do a couple laps and then some stretches before the real workout of the day began. Now those static stretches are reserved for the end.

Finnegan has put in nine years as the girl’s head coach and 14 years with the Montville program overall. However, he and his counterpart, Tim Egan, take a coeducational approach to team training, with Finnegan taking responsibility for girls’ and boys’ sprinters and Egan covering both sets of jumpers. Two assistant coaches tackle distance runners and field events.

The girls have a bit of a legacy to live up to, having won the Eastern Connecticut Conference Medium Division for the past three years, beating competitors like Bacon, New London and Killingly. Despite the obvious talents, the team is smaller this year, meaning that it will have fewer opportunities to score points in meets.

 “We have some very good kids, but we don’t have the depth of field this year,” Finnegan says.

All told, the track team holds somewhere between 25 and 30 boys and about the same number of girls.

Among these talents is Shatajah Wattley, one of the best female sprinters in the state, whose brother Daniel put down the a record 100-meter dash in 10.89, the best time in the ECC conference since its founding in 1934. She used her speed to take a 200-meter victory at the most recent meet.

On the boys’ side, Montville has strong runners in distance and in sprints. Among the sprinters who have racked up victories is Bobby Johnson, who competes in the 400 and 200 as well as relays. His brother Brandon is another winner who excels in the hurdles and short-distance.

"We train fast,” Finegan says of his sprinters. No surprises there. He says he focuses on their technique and works on acceleration so that he can get them up to speed quickly. 

The long-distance group, Finnegan explains, consists of a group of younger runners, mostly sophomores, who have already proven their mettle on the track — including a finish for the 3,200 (2 miles) in a time of 10:45. Finnegan says that in order to win meets the boys will have to do more work with field events.

Upcoming events will include the Irv Black meet on Saturday in New Britain and the Ledyard Relay Series, which will take place on Friday, April 29, and the following Saturday at the Ledyard High School track.  

The athletes on the team will compete in a total of five dual meets with other schools by the end of the season. The team in the league that gets the most wins out of the five dual meets becomes the medium division champions. These dual meets along with the larger events like the Ledyard Relay series and the ECC state meet can add up to a lot of time on the track for runners, who will sometimes do two meets a week.

But that busy schedule is met by the enthusiasm of a group willing to come out to practice in the cold on their spring vacations—and with three ECC championships to their name.

“I think we have a lot of potential with the guys,” said Ben Middel, who runs the 4 by 100-meter relay, the 400 and the 4 by 400 meter relay.

For the girls, Bri Rice, a hurdler, echoes the coach’s assessments about the team. “We have a lot of strength, not a lot of depth,” she says.

According to Finnegan, the football team is a good source for sprinters while soccer players and cross-country runners tend to make good distance runners. A few athletes also come from the basketball program. The range of athletic backgrounds makes sense considering the vastly different types of competition involved in track and field events. By putting their best foot forward in their events they’re in it to win together—again.