The Colfax-Mingo outdoor track is nothing to write home about. It has an old-school cinder surface. That means it’s impossible to host meets because other programs go elsewhere to find all-weather surfaces.
That hasn’t stopped Colfax-Mingo track and field coaches Zach Tomas and Matt Barkalow from dreaming about hosing a meet one day.
The wait is over.
The Tigerhawks will host a track and field meet in 2018. No, it won’t be on the old-school cinder surface behind the high school. Colfax-Mingo will host an indoor track meet at Grinnell College.
“We’ve always had that dream of doing it,” said Tomas, the girls’ track and co-ed cross country coach and the school’s athletic director. “I started talking to the starter at this year’s SICL meet, and he told me they had some open dates. So we made some calls and got something set up.”
The meet will take place a few days after the South Iowa Cedar League meet every year. The first one will be Thursday, March 22. Tomas has a few teams committed to attending but is still in the process of filling it up. He wants to have a six-team co-ed meet.
“Hosting is an exciting opportunity for our programs,” said Barkalow, who has been the boys’ track coach for more than a decade. “We finally will be able to recognize our senior athletes with a night for them and their parents. Our facility doesn’t allow us to host outdoor meets, but that doesn’t diminish how proud we are of our kids and the successes they’ve had over the years.”
Adding the home indoor meet allowed Tomas to no longer attend the Pekin Indoor meet at Central College.
“That meet always conflicted with speech contests anyway,” Tomas said. “Doing it this way will get us off that conflict and allow our season to start a little bit later.”
The indoor track meet is not the only new thing Colfax-Mingo will be hosting next calendar school year.
Tomas told me this week that the cross country team will host two meets and the volleyball team will host a four-team tournament in the fall.
The volleyball tournament takes place September 9. That tournament includes Baxter, Saydel and Des Moines Hoover. Colfax-Mingo had to remove a date on their schedule, and Tomas said the team will no longer attend the Twin Cedars tournament.
The cross country program will host two meets, the first being an earlybird type meet on Thursday, Sept. 7. The SICL meet is scheduled for Thursday, Oct. 17.
“The fact that it’s our turn in the rotation to host the SICL meet kind of forced our hand to have the first meet,” Tomas said. “We didn’t want our first meet at the country club to be the conference meet.”
The meet on September 7 includes teams from Baxter, Collins-Maxwell, Lynnville-Sully, Colo-NESCO, Keota, Pleasantville and the Woodward Academy boys.
In high school football news, the Baxter Bolts have added a 10th game, according to the team’s twitter account.
The Bolts open date was scheduled to be Sept. 15, but the team will now travel to East Union. That gives the Bolts three home games and seven road games in its first season as an eight-player program.
Contact Troy Hyde
at thyde@newtondailynews.com