On track (and field, and cross-country) at UMass

In the United States, except for the Olympics and outside a few hotbeds like the University of Oregon, Villanova, and the Santa Monica Track Club, track and field get little respect. Fortunately they don’t need much.

     “In track you don’t get a lot of outside reinforcement,” observed veteran coach Ken O’Brien, who has guided runners, jumpers and throwers at UMass since 1966. “There aren’t a lot of cheerleaders, and there’s not a lot of money.”

     UMass basketball has televised games, slogans on T-shirts in the Campus Center. Football, a national championship. Softball, repeat College World Series appearances and Olympic pitcher Danielle Henderson. Lacrosse, a nationally admired program and a newly surfaced field in the middle of campus. Even water polo and gymnastics can draw a crowd.

     But in track you provide all the motivation yourself, even if no one else ever notices.

     Do you even know where the UMass track is? (Hint: Look way off in the northwest corner of the campus, beyond the sewage treatment plant.)

     The track used to be closer to the rest of campus. “Actually they built the new administration building (Whitmore) on top of the old track,” said Tom Derderian ’73, who ran cross-country and track here. “But the track was on the edge of things then, too.”

     Derderian didn’t come to UMass to be a sports star. He came to study English literature and journalism. The time he did not spend in class, in the library, or sleeping he divided between working for The Collegian and running.

     As a high school senior in Milford, he was accepted to Boston University, Northeastern, and UMass. Having won his school conference championship in the mile, he was a credible candidate for a spot on the cross-country and track teams at any of the three, but he thinks today that his choice of UMass may be the reason he continued running competitively.

     “I came to UMass because it cost less,” he said recently, “but I wonder if I would have stuck with running if I’d had to run up and down Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. I would have found competition and the health benefits of running there, but the aesthetic quality in Amherst was different.”

     For four years Derderian explored Amherst’s back roads on long training runs. He led the cross-country team, brought his personal best time in the mile down to 4:25, and enjoyed success in the steeplechase, the grueling track race that includes jumping over rigid barriers, one of them in front of a shallow pit of water.

     “My goal was to finish with one dry foot.” Once he missed that goal in memorable fashion. “I fell in. It was at the New England championships. The Boston Globe photographer got a picture of me with only my eyes above the water, while a Holy Cross runner was jumping past and looking at me. In the next photo there was a Boston College runner going past and looking at me.” The race was far from over, however. “I did beat them both,” he continued. “I was refreshed.”

     For such athletes at UMass, these occasional moments of satisfaction in competition justify – or rather complement, since justification is unnecessary – the months of training demanded by what most people seem to regard as the least charismatic of sports. Diane Ozzolek, who came to UMass as a high school discus thrower and graduated in 1992 as a marketing major, recently recalled the long hours she put in to become the UMass record-holder in the women’s hammer throw and in the twenty-pound weight throw.

     “The hardest adjustment from high school was that suddenly track was a year-round sport,” said Ozzolek. “It can be hard to keep your motivation up when the goals are so far away.” Track training begins in September, yet the first competition is in the winter, indoors, and the spring season is a few weeks in April and May.

     She found motivation nevertheless. “It was exciting to be a pioneer. The women’s hammer was just catching on when I got to college.” She liked being able to educate people, to give them their first look at the most obscure event in all of athletics. “We had small crowds!” she said with a laugh. “I remember many track meets in the rain with three or four spectators.”

     Today Ozzolek, who also earned a master’s degree in sports management in Amherst, is a director of services at the Fleet Center in Boston, responsible for club suites and luxury seats at Bruins’ hockey games. Of the role her athletic career played in her life after college, she said, “I wanted to do something business-oriented. The hammer-throwing kept me involved in sports and made me more disciplined.”

Her emphasis on personal discipline, regardless of external rewards, is echoed by Mark Sylvander, a current senior and captain of the track team. Sylvander came to UMass mainly because it was affordable and because he liked the engineering program, but he was a fast quarter-miler and he did want a chance to run competitively at a Division I school.

     Sylvander lives in the “Track House” – not an official athletes’ dorm but an off-campus house he shares with half a dozen other track team members. “It’s convenient living where everyone is on the same schedule. In the dorms the partying doesn’t help. Here I have everything planned out – practice, classes, bedtime.”

     In his sophomore year Sylvander was part of a team that won the Atlantic Ten and New England championships. “I felt I contributed,” he said. “We won the four-by-four” – the 4 by 400-meter relay – “and that was my favorite team moment. It feels better when the team does well.”

     That comment is intriguing in itself, since track and field events are among the most individual of sports. “If there’s any team that’s not a team, it’s the track team,” said Derderian, who in his career was famous for his idiosyncratic workouts and his frequent disagreements with O’Brien.

     “Ken was in his twenties then,” Derderian commented. “It was easier to argue with him. He had all his hair.”

     “I was flexible enough to survive,” said O’Brien. “Tom didn’t have much love for structure or organization. But he never cut corners; he competed like a bear; he was a good team member.”

     Years later, when O’Brien’s stubborn former pupil returned to UMass and posed for journalistic purposes as an older student trying to make the cross-country team, he discovered that one of the team’s regular workout loops was familiarly referred to as “Derderian’s.”

     Today Derderian is a well-known running journalist. Randy Thomas, a UMass cross-country and track all-American three years after Derderian, now coaches at Boston College. Jane Welzel, who came to UMass as a swimmer but turned to running to help maintain her fitness, has enjoyed a career as a national-caliber road-racer. Ozzolek works for corporate America. Sylvander will be a civil engineer.

     What they and countless other UMass track athletes have in common is the experience O’Brien describes this way: “You show up and strip down to your shorts, and you don’t get any time-outs. You just see who’s the best today.” And that’s enough.

— John Stifler

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