Men's track heads to Purdue

Saturday the No. 14 men's indoor track and field team travels to West Lafayette for their most ferocious competition of the young season. The team will face rivals No. 13 Purdue and Ohio State. The meet begins Saturday morning at Lambert Fieldhouse. \nThe team opened the season successfully last weekend, handily defeating No. 22 Michigan, Michigan State and Kent State in Michigan. The team used the meet to gain competition experience, as they will use most of the dual meets in the indoor season.\n"I feel we learned a lot about what we need to improve with," junior Casey Friske said. "I definitely found what I need to work on."\nThe team enjoyed the opportunity to see where the athletes are in their training and what areas need improvement for the meet this weekend. The team was happy with the win but not satisfied.\n"We struggled in some places, being our first meet out," coach Marshall Goss said. "We have some places we're going to need to correct and get better."\nOne of the areas Goss was referring to was the distance corps, a group which did not provide as many points as the coaches would have liked. However, the philosophy of the distance runners gears more toward the later parts of the season, and Goss is confident that the group will come around.\n"We just basically wanted to go out and get a race under out belts," sophomore distance runner Eric Redman said. "We're pretty much training as hard as we can right now so we can be ready for the later part of indoor and outdoor."\nSeveral athletes stood out at Michigan, especially sophomore Aarik Wilson who jumped for a NCAA provisional qualifying mark in the triple jump with 52' 3". He looks to continue his success this weekend. Others who provided strong points for the team and look to lead the team this weekend were junior Contrell Ash and junior Ryan Sarbinoff.\nOne athlete who stepped in for an injured teammate and provided strong points was sophomore decathlete Jake Wiseman. Wiseman provided unexpected depth in the pole vault with a personal record vault and looks to continue his success.\nGoss said that he expects more impressive performances this weekend. He said that every event should leave the spectators satisfied.\n"It's going to be a great three-way track meet and it's just going to be loaded," Goss said. "Teams are going to have weak areas, but when you put it all together there won't be any weak areas to watch."\nWith such capable competition, the team hopes to have other athletes attain their provisional marks for the NCAA meet. Goss said that he expected many events to have marks worthy of pushing the provisional marks.