A battle between conferences will take place this weekend as IU heads to Louisville for the Big Ten vs. ACC Challenge. Purdue and Michigan State will join forces with IU as they take on Notre Dame, Pittsburgh and host Louisville from the ACC.
Most of the competition will take place Saturday with field events beginning at 10:00 a.m. and track events at noon. The only event Friday is the hammer throw.
IU Coach Ron Helmer said he is looking forward to this trip because it’s a little bit more laid back than some of the usual meets the team is involved in but still very competitive.
“It should be fun and typically produces good times,” Helmer said. “This meet gives off a team feel without any one school being obligated to line all their guys up. It also gives teams a chance to run their better athletes in their off-events.”
Helmer said he plans to bring a lot of people to this meet. He said although a handful of athletes will be sitting out, the team is still going to take 33 men.
The big names to look out for this weekend will be the throwers. Junior Andrew Miller will be competing in the hammer throw Friday, but three Hoosiers will also throw Saturday.
Sophomore Drew Ludwig will throw the javelin in his first outdoor meet of the season. Fellow sophomores Willie Morrison and David Schall will be competing in both the shot put and discus events.
The Hoosiers will have some athletes double up in both the 800-meter and 1,500-meter runs. Two IU teams will participate in the final race of the night, the 4x400-meter relay.
Helmer said his message to the team this week was the same it’s been for a while now, a mix between patience and hard work.
“Most everyone on the team has had some good moments,” Helmer said. “The way that you continue to get better is to keep on doing what you were doing before.”
The fact that not everyone moves forward at the same time is something that Helmer said he stresses to his team. He said athletes move at their own rate, but the ones who stay patient are the ones who get to where they want to be.
“In this instant-gratification world, it takes way longer to develop than most people want it to,” Helmer said. “The getting better occurs because people are doing the things they are supposed to do on a consistent basis.”
Helmer said he believes there are some people who have stepped up recently after not contributing during the indoor season Big Ten Championship run. He also said the team is getting back some team members who have been working on getting completely healthy.
Junior All-American runner Daniel Kuhn is among the few athletes who are working to get back in shape. He has missed a good portion of the outdoor season due to an illness. Helmer said he thinks it’s possible that Kuhn might not return this season.
“Daniel has already missed plenty of training time,” Helmer said. “Due to that, I think we are ultimately going to redshirt him. You don’t take a 1:46-800m runner out there when he’s only prepared to run 1:48. You just don’t do that to a guy of his caliber.”
Helmer said he doesn’t want to get hung up on this bump, but rather look at it from a different perspective.
“How we’ve approached this, is we are going to take a negative and turn it into a positive, Helmer said. “The positive is that two years from now he’ll be a grown man if he isn’t already and he’ll still be here with a sophomore class that is really good.”
Helmer said there are two different ways they can go about handling this situation. He said they can keep him out for next indoor season, too, to make him eligible for both seasons in his fifth year or they can just redshirt him for the rest of this year.
“We’ll just have to wait and see how it plays out,” Helmer said.
