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Last year, Juniata High School had one track and field meet at home, which was actually one more than the school expected due to a planned construction job that impacted Deitrick Field.
This year, the Indians seemingly will be lucky if they get to run on their own track, and no one seems to want to say why.
If the rumors are true, the track is a victim of the same construction job that delayed, but ultimately improved, the condition of the football field – as in, the actual field, not the stadium.
In addition to killing cats, curiosity fuels reporters to ask questions – most of us who are in the profession chose it out of a desire to learn more about what’s happening around us, and to share that knowledge with others. And there’s nothing that gets a reporter’s dander up more than the two-word phrase, “No comment.”
I haven’t even gotten that far with this one. And that’s why things a good reporter despises – speculation and anonymous sources – are needed to tell this story.
It actually began in early April, when Juniata was to host its first track meet against Greenwood. Despite being scheduled for a relatively nice day in which numerous sports events were held, the meet was postponed into the following week. Not unfathomable – perhaps the bad weather that preceded that day had been too much for the cinder track to withstand.
Then it was delayed another week. Then it was turned from a home meet into a road trip.
That was definitely not the weather’s fault.
I asked Juniata coach Kim Hart what was going on, and she deferred to her superiors. I’ve spoken to Juniata County School District’s athletic director, Alyssa Wittle, who said she didn’t know enough about it to answer questions.
An effort to reach Keith Yarger, the superintendent of the district, both by phone and email, met with no response.
That raised more red flags than three bad exchanges in a 4×100 relay.
So I’ve been asking around, talking to parents of track athletes, and to coaches from other teams that run against Juniata.
The best guess is, the company that did the geothermal installation, which would have been responsible for returning the track to a useful state for the season, didn’t. In fact, it appears the track was rendered unusable when the contractor dumped too much cracker dust – the crushed rock that has replaced actual cinders on cinder tracks – on the surface.
The running lanes, one person said, are closer to sand – perhaps even quicksand – than an actual surface that can be run on.
Supposedly – again, no one in an official capacity wants to explain what’s going on – the surface was rolled to try and both stabilize and flatten the top layer, but the three-ton roller used for the job proved insufficient. The company is said to be planning a visit with a 10-ton roller, and it may or may not happen before the next – and final – scheduled league meet for the season.
No big deal, you say? You wouldn’t say that if it was costing you money – and it probably is, since the meets that were to be at home may all end up on the road. Transportation isn’t free.
Track is a sport that serves more students than any other – even football teams are rarely on par with the size of a good track team.
And the condition of the surface could affect not only safety of the students, but qualifying times for district, and ultimately state meets.
It’s bad enough that most of the league is still running on 1950s-era surfaces – actually, they probably were really cinders back then – instead of the relatively inexpensive synthetic tracks that are considered safer and more conducive to better performance.
Lest we forget, this is the track that benefited from a $15,000 competition-based donation not quite six years ago to improve the condition of the facility. The hard work put into that effort – and the sacrifices already made by the student athletes at Juniata during the current project – seem to mean very little when the people in charge refuse to say what is going on.
Jeff Fishbein is sports editor of The Sentinel. Contact him at jfishbein@lewistownsentinel.com.