Faulty track forces regional meet to switch venues
Imagine throwing out months of planning for an intricate event that involves more than 1,500 people just a couple of days before it’s scheduled to take place. That’s exactly the nightmare scenario that played out for organizers of the OFSAA West Regional Track and Field championships slated for Friday and Saturday. Originally scheduled for the athletic facilities at Sandwich Secondary School, problems with the track’s surface forced an 11th hour change of venue. Through the collaborative efforts of both school boards, the Essex Ravens football club and the University of Windsor, the meet will now be held at the university ’s stadium.
“It’s refreshing when you have a community in place where I can call seven or eight people and everyone works to make it happen,” said meet co-convener Craig Cavanagh.
Once all the details were ironed out, an official announcement about the venue change went up on the meet’s website Tuesday. Now Cavanagh is trying to ensure that every last coach and athlete from here to Kitchener knows about it.
The meet involves more than 1,300 athletes from 120 schools plus coaches and parents.
“We’re trying to get the word out and get confirmation from everyone,” he said. Sandwich track coach Rob Moore alerted Cavanagh to surface problems with the track last Friday.
Earlier this spring there had been minor issues with the rubber coating bubbling up but it has since gotten worse.
Scott Scantlebury, spokesman for the Greater Essex District Public School Board, said board staff inspected the track and deemed it unsafe. He said the track was redone just over a year ago and is still under warranty. Scheduling issues prevented the manufacturer from making repairs before the meet. Having it fixed was the first option for Cavanagh and fellow convener Steve Hneidi.
The next was moving it either to the university or to a suitable venue in Chatham-Kent. “We have 300 hotel rooms booked, maybe more, so we couldn’t really change cities,” Cavanagh said. “And not having it at all would have been a disaster.” The West Regional meet is a required qualifier for advancing to the all- Ontario OFSAA championships.
Simply shifting over to the university wasn’t simple at all because of conflicts with a university convocation Friday and three scheduled Ravens’ football games Saturday against visiting teams from Ottawa.
University athletic director Mike Havey and his staff helped tweak a plan that met the approval of president Alan Wildeman. The university ’s final spring convocation involving the faculty of law is Friday from 2 to 5 p.m. The track meet’s schedule of events runs from 2 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Several years ago, Wildeman decreed that nothing else would occur on campus during a con- vocation ceremony after public address announcements from a soccer game drifted through the St. Denis Centre during a fall commencement.
The public address system will not be used at the track until the graduation ceremony is over. University parking lots will be reserved for those going to convocation.
Parking for the track folks will instead be offered for $5 at Assumption secondary school, just south of the stadium.
The main entrance to the meet will be located at the stadium’s south gate as opposed to the normal entrance off College Avenue. Saturday’s schedule has been compressed and will start an hour earlier — 8 a.m. for field events and 9 a.m. for track events — to minimize the disruption to Ravens’ football. The meet needs to be done by 2:30 p.m., which makes for a hectic day for the 100 volunteers and track officials trying to pull it all off.
The Ravens moved their bantam game to Sandwich Secondary while keeping the junior and senior varsity games at the university at 3:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. respectively. Moving the bantam game to a 12:30 p.m. start at Sandwich required lining the football field and reinstalling goalposts there as well as getting permission from the visiting teams, the league and the referees.
“This whole thing has been a little chaotic,” said Ravens’ club president Glen Mills. “But they ’ve got a thousand athletes coming, we had to make sure this thing goes off.”