Keene State’s Indoor Track program sent a long jump athlete to the national stage for the first time on Friday, March 12. Junior Aidan Law traveled to Rochester, N.Y. to participate in the NCAA DIII, where he finished just shy of the qualifying distance for finals.
Throughout this past season, both Law and the rest of KSC’s Indoor Track team has dominated the Little East Conference competition and DIII as a whole. According to previous reporting by The Equinox, the track teams, indoor and outdoor, practices without an actual track facility, which creates a tougher environment for a team to have consistent and meaningful training. Athletic Director Marty Testo said he believes this disadvantage has created the perseverance for an athlete like Law to make it to national competition.
“The credit is to the time, effort, attention paid in detail and making the best of a challenging situation when we don’t have the practice resources of other competitors. Not making it an excuse, just being thankful for what we have and how we get through it. And for somebody like [Law] and others, it has paid off,” Testo said.
Law has capped off the season with a trip to the national competition. Throughout the season, the junior broke a school record and then went on to break that same record set by himself. Law credits the success at the end of the season as well as the trips to NCAA Indoor Track championships to a change in training and determination.
“I’ve gotten more on a specific training schedule, I dedicated some days to lifting and others to working on specifics in my training,” Law said. “It’s definitely something I had to change because at the start of the season I was just going through practices doing general work and not figuring out what I needed to work on the most and now I am focused on the little details.”
On the day of the big jump, Law competed against the top long jumpers at the DIII level across the country. The junior’s best jump out of three was posted at 7.04, which was enough to tie for ninth place. The top ten qualified, which meant the tie at ninth would push Law forward into the finals. Another junior in the competition capitalized on their third attempt and scored a 7.18, which was enough to bump Law out of the tie and into 11th place.
The junior would have had to jump 7.05 meters to stay in the top ten qualifiers, a distance that he shattered when he broke the school record again, jumping 7.25. For Law, coming a little short with the 7.04 was not enough to qualify for the finals, and closed the season out for the junior.
After a season of several broken records and a trip to the NCAA indoor track championships, Law said he is grateful for those around him who push hard and challenge him to be better every day.
“Obviously my parents, during the summer I was putting in a lot of work and they have just been encouraging me. I was saying I want to go to nationals, and my parents were saying, ‘Well, you’ve got to show it,’ and they have just encouraged me to keep doing what I am doing.”
The junior also touched on teammates being a meaningful factor in the success this past season, adding, “Another jumper Eden [Damis] is always seeing the results and work I’m doing and commenting on it saying it’s all really good. It motivates him too to put in that much effort,” Law said.
The second team all-American capped off the season with that 11th-place finish on the national level and will look to perform well in the next season.
Jacob Enscoe can be contacted at
jenscoe@kscequinox.com
