MARSHFIELD – If there were two things any high school coach could want in a team, this year’s Marshfield High School boys track and field team possesses both.
“We had a great year last year,” second-year head coach Ben Corcoran told Hub City Times, during our March 18 visit to his spring break track camp at Marshfield High School. “In our indoor season, we took second at indoor conference, and then in the outdoor season, taking third at outdoor conference. Sending a handful of guys down to State, a lot of younger guys that have a lot of potential and we’re really excited about them. So, it was a great first year.”
Corcoran, an MHS and UW-Stout graduate who threw shot put and discus at both levels, has coached in the Marshfield program since 2012.
“We get people from all different sports and guys that want to compete for different reasons and it’s exciting because when we can get them all to kind of mesh together and compete for the same reason and have fun and make themselves better as an athlete in general, it’s an exciting thing,” Corcoran told us.
His current roster features 81 student-athletes, and that’s exactly the kind of depth he is looking for.
“As a team, we want to score points from top to bottom,” Corcoran said. “First, second, third is great, but if we can get a lot of points in those second, third, fourth-place positions, that’s even better because that helps add up points. We always talk about track being a zero-sum sport. If we score points that somebody else did not get, we’re taking them from another school, so it helps us in the general team aspect of everything. First place is great, but the depth of getting the third, the fourth, that’s where teams like SPASH gain a lot of points because they have such good depth and that’s what we’re looking at to try to build up towards, too.”
As far as filling each of the events in a typical track and field meet, Corcoran says it’s a process that sort of takes care of itself – with a little help from the coaches.
“One thing that we do as a staff is we try to find what strengths each person has,” he shared. “If there’s somebody that can jump, we’ll try them at high jump. If we have somebody that’s strong or is fairly quick in a 10-yard sprint, they could be a good thrower. So, we always try to give them an opportunity to kind of show where they’re at, especially with our younger athletes because we want to see what their strengths are. Some of the guys that are returning, we know they have strengths in certain areas, so we’ll place them in the positions that they want to compete in. But sometimes we’ll have some people that really surprise us because they want to stay in one area and we try to see that they have a strength of maybe running in a longer race and so on, so we’ve got to really watch the athletes. A lot of it is what they like, too, but we also want to point them in the right direction because that’s part of our job as coaches.”
The one thing no one can really coach is experience, and Marshfield has a lot of it.
“We have a handful of guys coming back that are very good leaders,” Corcoran told us. “Just to name a few of them, Jackson Anderson is a great leader, Lincoln Berger, Eli Bremer. Tyler Gingery is one of our pole vaulters. Triton Gross is a huge aspect of our team. Carson Klumb, Micah Herman, we have Beckett McFarlane coming back. David Schumacher. Those are just a few of them, but they are kind of our senior leaders. One thing that I noticed from last year, though, is they really stepped in as leaders even as juniors, and now coming up as seniors, they’re kind of picking up right where they left off.
“We also have a lot of really good juniors and sophomores that are coming back, too. Harland Meissner is a big one. He’s a big part of our sprints. We also have Adrian Pieper, who’s another guy that solidifies some of our sprints and our relays.
“And then also to add on, we have a lot of sophomores that are returning, and they were very successful last year,” Corcoran added. “Derek Ongna was a State qualifier in the high jump. Never did it before in his life. What an awesome surprise that was. We’re hoping that he can pick up right where he left off. Also another sophomore that qualified for State was Gavin Larsen in the 60-meter dash. He’s a guy that, I tell Coach [Riley] Gebelein, ‘Where can’t we put him?’ We could put him in just about any event and he’s going to be successful. He’s a competitor and he wants to get out there and do really well. Marshall Neve is also a returner who’s a very good distance runner. He’ll be a sophomore this year.”
As for some of the new kids on the block, Corcoran said he is very excited about this year’s freshman class.
“One that I know that I’ve heard a lot about — and I know Coach [Dan] Akin is pretty excited about – is Christopher Berg. He’s a distance runner or long sprinter,” Corcoran shared. “He’s [Akin] talked a lot about Liam Hoerneman. He had a really successful middle school year.”
This year’s squad features eighteen seniors, sixteen juniors, nineteen sophomores and twenty-seven freshmen.
The Tigers already have two meets under their belts.
Marshfield joined 29 other teams March 21 at the SPASH Invitational held at UW-Stevens Point, which also included Stratford and Auburndale.
The Tigers also hosted the Marshfield Invite March 24 in the MHS field house. That meet featured Columbus Catholic, Stratford, Granton, Colby, Greenwood, Pittsville, and Owen-Withee, among others.
Marshfield will be among more than three dozen teams competing April 2 at an invitational at UW-Stout.
The Tigers will be back at UWSP April 4 for another multi-team invite.
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