As the spring season descends upon us, the Mesa College men’s and women’s track teams are set and ready for the starting gun.

Leading the squad of Olympians is Leslie Coons, a former student and track athlete at Mesa, who is entering her 10th year here as head coach.

Last season the women’s team took a 4th place finish and the men concluded their year with a 5th place ranking in each of their respective conferences.

Standout freshman Morgan Bogard ended the season ranked 6th in the state and 10th in the nation in the women’s hammer throw. Freshman Fransisco Aguirre earned himself a 4th place ranking in the state for men’s distance.

This year the Olympians hope that strong squads for both the men and the women will return each of their respective teams back to the top of the conference, a place neither team has been in a while.

“Everyone is training really hard,” said returning sophomore Thomas McDougald. “Everyone is consistent. They’re constantly showing up to practice and working hard so we should make it to state this year.”

Last year McDougald recorded a personal best time of 21.12 seconds in the 200-meter dash, about a second shy of the school record, before various injuries cut his season short. However, the sprinter is back on the track this year with full health.

“I was over-training last year, that’s one of the reasons my injuries occurred,” said McDougald. “This season I’m just taking it easy, going on more road runs, which is distance running, just trying to work on the muscular endurance, doing some pull workouts so that I don’t overwork the muscles that were injured.”

This year the track team begins their season already facing a hurdle of never having a home meet because of a dirt track that isn’t up to regulation.

“I think mentally, it gets to them that they don’t have a home facility,” said Coach Coons. “They don’t get that home crowd. We’re like the last dirt college track in the state. I think it’s been this way since 1965 and they haven’t made any improvements on it since.”

Bogard, Aguirre, and McDougald, as well as standout hurdler Carlton Smith return to an Olympian team that fields only about 30 combined athletes this year, an undersized amount despite a laborious recruiting effort.

“Oh yeah, we recruit,” said Coons. “It’s really hard to recruit athletes to come to Mesa though because every place else in San Diego has an all-weather track. So we usually get underdog type kids.”

Despite what would appear to be setbacks, the Mesa track and fielders had a strong start out of the blocks. In only the first meet of the season, Bogard set a new Mesa school record for the women’s hammer throw with 166 foot, 2 inch toss.

“In her first meet of the year she (Bogard) beat all the guys,” said Coons. “It’s funny, she broke the school record and the ring was slippery, the cage wasn’t right, it was just terrible conditions but she pulled through. We’re just waiting for the conditions to line up for her.”

As the Olympians do not host a home meet this year it becomes tough to catch them in action. However, they will be competing in the Aztec Invitational over at SDSU on Mar. 16-17. You can catch them again in San Diego on May 5th at UCSD for the So Cal prelims and May 12th for the So Cal championships, also at UCSD.