ENMU to face LSC's fastest, strongest

PORTALES — College track and field season flies faster than the sneakers carrying runners around the oval.

As the season began in March, it seemed like the Lone Star Conference track and field championships at Eastern New Mexico University were far off in the distance. They’re now upon us, scheduled for Thursday through Saturday at Greyhound Stadium.

It will be the first time ENMU hosts the LSC championships and the culmination of hard work for Eastern head coach Jeff Kavalunas and so many others, work that’s been going on since well before this season began, well before 2019 even began.

And now, here at last.

“We’re getting excited,” Kavalunas said. “Part of it is not just having our kids compete at home and being able to do this for the first time, but we’re going from the planning stage to, for me, to now being able to turn my attention to focus on the athletes, the meet itself, participating, getting them ready to have a great performance here at the end of the season. It’s a home conference meet, too. We’re coaching our kids to have some great performances on the home track.”

Hosting the Lone Star Conference meet involves more than just teams showing up and competing at the starter’s pistol. It’s a 19-team NCAA Division II conference championship meet involving an estimated 600 athletes. “When you start throwing in athletic trainers and coaches, that’s pretty good numbers,” Kavalunas said.

And there will be a good number of people helping out — with the gate, with the tape, with just about everything.

“It’s really a university activity, a community activity,” Kavalunas said. “It’s much more than a track and field event or an event that the track and field team is hosting. It’s a big university event. Hopefully, we draw a good number of spectators for that. It’s certainly a great challenge to coordinate it and try to do it first class. But we’re going to host this meet and it’s going to be one of the best meets the Lone Star Conference has put on.”

The meet begins at 1 p.m. Thursday with the multi-events. It resumes 10 a.m. Friday with the conclusion of the multi-events. The field events get going at 1 p.m. Friday, with the qualifying running events starting at 5 p.m. Saturday’s finals begin at 1 p.m.

“Saturday moves along pretty quick,” Kavalunas said.

Eastern hopes for as strong a showing as possible, but has brutal competition in both the men’s and women’s events. Kavalunas noted West Texas A&M and Angelo State as the women’s powerhouses. “I think it’s going to be a real tight team battle between them,” he said. “On the men’s side, Commerce is really strong and West Texas won the indoor. Those are really the top teams, I would say.”

Kavalunas has some athletes, though, that he thinks could make a dent in the three-day meet.

“We’re still looking to add depth in the program, so it’s going to be difficult to be in the top couple of spots and compete for team titles,” he said. “But the beauty of where we’re at right now is, we’re going to have individuals compete for individual titles. The goal is to have more every year. We know where we’re at. Our goal is always to do what we can to finish as high as we can in the conference. But we also have to be realistic.”

Eastern has pockets of strengths, areas dotted up and down the lineup where individual titles are reachable.

“Ivar Moinat’s been having a great season in the 800, and that’s going to be a close race,” Kavalunas said. “He’s probably one of the favorites we have on the men’s side.”

Kavalunas thinks it could come down to Moinat, a runner from Texas A&M-Kingsville and one from Lubbock Christian. Moinat — an ENMU junior originally from Amsterdam, Netherlands — finished third at this past weekend’s Drake Relays in Des Moines, Iowa, an event that featured nine Division I runners.

“For the women,” Kavalunas continued, “we have a little bit more depth in the sprints. Kandice Miles has run the 100 and the 200 well the past few weeks, but in our conference the sprint teams are so deep. It’ll be tough, but she has the ability.

“Mercy Rotich, I think, will be up there competing for some titles. We’re going to run her in the 1,500 and the 5,000,” Kavalunas added of the Greyhounds’ distance standout who was the indoor 3,000 champion this past winter.

Kavalunas sees potential for the Hounds throughout their roster.

“On the women’s side, our sprints and relays and some of our distance,” he said. “On the men’s side, we’ve got a good group of long sprinters and mid-distance (runners) — our 200-, 400-, 800-meter runners have been really running well. We have a couple of freshmen that are really running well in the conference. It’ll be tough to compete for a title, but they can still run pretty fast.”

However the Greyhounds perform, they’ll be part of history, part of the first Lone Star Conference championship meet hosted by the school.

“We’ve been working hard to get this organized and get it off the ground,” Kavalunas said. “Once the meet gets started, it should run itself.”