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| USVI Coach Neville Hodge, left and BVI counterpart Dag Samuels |
ATHENS, Greece—U.S. and British Virgin Islands track and field coaches Neville Hodge and Dag Samuels are glad Tuesday’s technical meeting is behind them as they look to Friday’s track and field competition. The Shot Put events start at 10 a.m. today in Olympia.
“I think everything is pretty much in place and they gave us an overview of what’s going on and how things are going to run,” Hodge said. “I think all of us needed that information to know that our athletes will be well taken care of. What wasn’t given could have been collected from a technical area so I think the meeting went fairly well.”
Hodge said his squad is trying to relax and stay focused after the work they have done. “We are getting ready to perform at our best in this competition and hopefully, our performances will give us what we are looking for—to get to the finals ultimately,” he said.
Hodge, who coaches at Morgan State, said his biggest challenge in getting to Athens for the games was the lines of communication. “Information was not disseminated properly between myself, athletes and the administration,” he noted. “But now that I’m here things are moving in place. Everybody knows what they have to do, so things are in place the way we want them now.”
On his end, Samuels said there was a bit of confusion as someone independently selected the event for Dion Crabbe who hadn’t made the Olympic Games qualifying standard. Crabbe was entered in the 100 and not the 200—his better event. “The bottom line is that we got it sorted out. I went to the head technical official and right then and there, he said it was a small matter,” Samuels explained. “If someone is prepared to do an event and at the 99th hour, you hear well, you are doing something else, then there’s a problem with the psyche and we may not have had the performance that we needed and I’m glad it worked out that way.”
As a Central American and Caribbean track and field technical committee member, Samuels said the technical meetings are very important. “In every venue, there are the logistics on how things move and they are different from one meet to the next. You have to be involved and know what’s going on,” he stated. “It is important to know what is happening.”
Both Samuels and Hodge agree that athletes in the Virgin Islands need more meets in order for them to qualify for the Olympic Games or any of the other games. Samuels said are under pressure to make qualifying times and every time they think they have done well, they think that they have made the qualifying standards. “We’ll notice that next season, our athletes will make qualifying standards so easy because they don’t have that pressure,” he said. “I think there’s a lot of pressure on most of the athletes to make these standards and if it wasn’t I’m sure they would have run faster.”
Hodge said more support is needed from the hierarchy to have athletes compete outside of the Virgin Islands and prepare them for games. “Pressure creates a lot of problems,” he noted. “But when you’re running and running for just having fun, the times come a lot easier.”
