Mostly sunny with a cool breeze. No rain. That was the weekend weather that was in Lawrence and wouldn’t you know it?
No Kansas Relays.
The venerable Memorial Stadium track and field meet, so dogged by mid-April rain and winds over the years, took a one-year sabbatical and the weather was perfect for running, jumping and throwing.
Or was it a just a one-year hiatus?
Renovation work at Memorial Stadium forced the cancellation of the Kansas Relays this year, just as it will necessitate shifting Saturday’s spring football game to Haskell Stadium.
However, more construction work is scheduled next year at Memorial Stadium. That phase will involve expansion of the press box.
Will it force still another cancellation of the Kansas Relays?
Nobody is saying now, but you have to wonder. KU officials could conduct the Relays with a makeshift press box, but construction is construction and that means liability concerns — particularly with hundreds of athletes all over the place.
Then there is the running track at Memorial Stadium. Number one, it isn’t in very good shape. Number two, it doesn’t belong there. Tracks in football stadiums are anachronisms.
Maybe this is the time for Kansas University to join the contemporary world and build a free-standing track facility.
Shoot, even Missouri has one now. Kansas State has had one for years. So has Nebraska and Oklahoma and Colorado and Oklahoma State and Iowa State, and on and on. Most of the major universities in the country long ago jerked the track facility out of the football stadium.
Not Kansas.
As long as KU had a workable facility in its football stadium, why move it? Well, that argument doesn’t wash anymore. The running track is deteriorating and it makes no sense to tear it up and put a new one in its place.
Also, there was the notion KU needed all those stadium seats to accommodate the throngs that came to witness the Kansas Relays every year.
Today, though, the Kansas Relays has evolved into a high school meet — a very good one at that — and prep track meets lure friends and relatives, not throngs.
Staging the contemporary Kansas Relays in a football stadium is a little like holding the Henley Regatta in the Atlantic Ocean.
Moreover, Kansas is committed to upgrading its dying football stadium with millions of dollars in improvements. In so doing, what sense does it make to leave the running track there?
Until the early 70s, Oklahoma State had a running track inside Lewis Field, its football stadium. Then OSU was able, thanks to donors, to build a track and field facility down the road. As soon as the running track was removed from Lewis Field, the football field was torn out, lowered and more seats were built close to the field.
Obviously, it doesn’t make sense to raze and lower until you need a new football field and KU doesn’t. At least not now. However, the current AstroTurf was installed in 1990 and it doesn’t have too many years left.
Too, the trend these days is to replace artificial turf with real grass.
Kansas football coach Terry Allen would be first, I’m sure, to second the motion of re-installing grass, last seen inside Memorial Stadium in 1969. Allen isn’t alone in believing grass reduces injuries.
All of this costs money, of course, and Kansas may be tapped out with all of its current capital improvement projects.
Renovation work is also under way in Allen Fieldhouse. Too, the ground has already been leveled for a new volleyball-basketball practice facility and more improvements are coming for KU’s baseball stadium.
What’s sad is that so much of this is merely just playing catch-up.
