By Mark Walters

To go along with Alana’s article last week about Hofstra adding sports teams to its arsenal, how about a track and field team?

While many of you may think track and cross country are the same sport, they are not. Cross country is in the fall. A team is composed of a minimum of 5-7 runners, (top five score in races, six and seven displace). Meets consist of a race anywhere between 3.1-6.2 miles. Races are held at parks and on trails.

Track and field is in the spring. Teams consist of a lot more athletes, as there are distance runners, sprinters, jumpers, and throwers. Races are conducted on a 400-meter oval. It’s more individualized than cross country, but that is not the issue.

Hofstra has a cross country team, but it does not field a track team. Not really, that is. It should be known that the cross country team practices year round. After our last race-the IC4A Championship-on November 22 we take a week or so off, and then we get back to training for the spring season, which for us is considered off-season training.

Really though, it’s a glorified off-season training program, as we compete in meets, mostly low-key, have a strictly regimented practice and lifting schedule, and take it seriously. Well, we try to take it seriously, but being that we’re not an officially sanctioned NCAA team, we’re basically a club team, and thus have no conference championship. For those of you that don’t follow me, let me put it to you this way: I could run a world record in a given race and not qualify for the NCAA Track & Field Championships.

It’s a darn shame. Competing in the Colonial Athletic Association against the likes of William and Mary, Georgia State, George Mason and Delaware, it is tough to size up with them without an official track team. Training in the spring is not the same without a conference championship to strive for, and it gets frustrating.

While I’m not going to get too deep into the X’s and O’s, simple research shows that it wouldn’t cost much to field a track and field team. A few more coaches, some javelins and hurdles. A track? We commonly train at the Mitchell Field Athletic Complex behind the rec center, not ours but a usable and convenient facility. And don’t get me started on how simple it would have been to put a track around the new field hockey field on the intramural fields.

There is a wealth of talent in the New York metropolitan and Tri-State areas – plenty of talent that goes to Seton Hall, Stony Brook, Adelphi, Columbia, Fordham, Manhattan, et al. We could be getting those potential recruits if we had a track and field team. Now with that local talent, believe it or not, we’d actually be a legitimate contender for the Colonial Athletic Association title every spring. It wouldn’t happen in the team’s first season, maybe not even in the first few years, but over some time, Hofstra would have a track and field team that could bring another championship banner to the Mack.

So there ya have it. Low cost and conference titles, what more could an athletic department want?

Mark Walters is a senior staff writer for The Chronicle. He is the senior captain of the Hofstra men’s cross country team. This is his memoir of his final season wearing the blue, white, and yellow.