Saturday’s Pepsi Team Invitational will mark the outdoor season debut for several prominent Duck athletes, including Jordan Hasay and Brianne Theisen.
Another group will also look to have a strong showing at Hayward Field: Bowerman’s Pack.
Oregon’s two-year-old track and field student section is looking to boost support and volume at home track meets this season. Since most students were away on spring break for the Ducks’ first home meet this year (the Oregon Preview), the meet will serve as the season’s official launch.
“What we’re focused on this year is really amping up the quote-unquote game-day experience,” former Oregon track and field administrative assistant Patrick Werhane said. “Getting them to the meet is the first objective. Getting them excited about the athletes and the performances and getting them integrated as part of the whole game-day thing …
“People know what to do during football games. Track is different. What we’re working on this year is ways to get them energized, get them excited, make them feel like they’re part of the meet.”
Bowerman’s Pack has seven undergraduate coordinators and a small but devoted band of followers. Its ubiquitous T-shirts — featuring an image of Bill Bowerman wearing a fedora — have lent the group a measure of respectability and recognition among the typical Oregon student and the typical track and field season-ticket holder.
“As the year progressed, more and more people recognized the logo,” said Mickey Godfrey, a senior business administration major and one of the coordinators. “At the end of the year, I felt like we were in a good place. More and more people were supporting Bowerman’s Pack.”
Already, the Pack has made a major change, moving from open-air Powell Plaza to the covered Section F of the West Grandstand at Hayward. Section F is located about 100 meters from the finish line, nearest the Bowerman Building.
“You can see just off the Bowerman Curve,” Godfrey said. “It’s an exciting spot for a lot of people. It gives us the opportunity to condense our numbers and make it feel more like a student section. You can see everything. The javelin, the hammer, horizontal jumps, high jump, everything.”
Bowerman’s Pack, which has an average attendance in the low hundreds, faces obstacles in translating the complexities of track and field to the casual fan. With multiple events going on at once, directing students’ attention can be an issue. Significance of marks — and wind, and other factors — is seldom readily understood. The student leaders have been working on educational materials to better explain how track meets work.
Another immediate obstacle stems from name recognition. The Pack loses the name recognition of graduated athletes such as Andrew Wheating and Ashton Eaton in attracting students to meets.
“Within the UO right now, there are not a lot of individuals that students can connect with,” Godfrey said. “There are great individual athletes that are competing every day. We need to recognize these individuals. We need to promote these individuals.”
Part of the Pack’s mission statement — available on bowermanspack.com, the section’s official website — reads: “We are dedicated to preserving the tradition of and passion for track and field at the University of Oregon.” That includes catching students up on where Oregon track and field has come from, and where it is going, while disseminating from and dissecting through the athletes, marks and minutiae that can overwhelm casual fans.
“We want to increase the number of track and field fans in Track Town USA. That’s our main goal,” Werhane said.
Werhane is a former Oregon distance runner who worked in the Casanova Center with assistant athletic director Vin Lananna before accepting a job at Nike following the indoor track and field season. In his role as liaison to the track and field office, he has received valuable feedback and heard valuable praise.
“I had people tell me, once the students started to cheer, it kind of spilled down the whole West Grandstand,” he said. “It got everybody to cheer.”
Injury report
Distance runners Alex Kosinski (back) and Mac Fleet (foot), sprinter Michele Williams (toe) and javelin thrower Sam Crouser (back) have been ruled out of the Pepsi Invitational, Lananna said.
Fleet is recovering from right foot surgery performed this offseason, and Williams’ injury kept her from participating during the indoor season. Kosinski’s injury forced her to pull out of the NCAA Indoor Track and Field Championships last month.
Crouser, the freshman from Gresham who holds the national prep javelin record, will be held out as a precautionary measure.
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