Colorado Triathlon Team Rebuilds Faster Than Expected
Broderick’s Win and Wane’s Podium Spot Pace the Team to Third
By Adam Hodges
race day story | additional coverage | results | team history
University of Colorado Triathlon Team
April 21, 2009 (Boulder, CO) – “I am pretty blown away at how far we've come since November,” said Mike Ricci, who took the helm as head coach of the University of Colorado Triathlon Team at the end of 2008. Ricci was reflecting back on the past six months of work the team did in preparation for the USAT Collegiate National Championships held last weekend in Lubbock, Texas.
Going into this year’s championship race, the team only had three men and one woman returning from last year. “So not a lot in the way the experience or depth,” said Ricci.
“I knew this was a rebuilding year and I honestly expected we'd take a step back in terms of overall team performance at nationals. I thought a top five would be a very long shot. Upholding CU's tradition was weighing heavily on me since I took the job in November, but I kept reminding myself how young this team was and that we were working for the long term—and if that meant taking a step back in 2009, that was okay.”
CU’s tradition includes ten team titles in sixteen years of racing plus a handful of individual titles. Although they arguably have the longest standing tradition in collegiate triathlon, other programs have been developing traditions of their own. Among them include the California schools—UC-Berkeley, UC-San Diego, UCLA, and Cal Poly—as well as Army and Navy. As more schools develop the support structure for collegiate triathlon, the list continues to grow.
From 1994 through 2005, CU had never lost the team title for more than one year without regaining it. However, CU’s domination at nationals has been challenged more and more in recent years with their last team title now coming four years ago.
UC-Berkeley and UC-San Diego, along with strong Army and Navy teams were to test the mettle of a young CU squad this year in Lubbock. CU had a number of talented swimmers, bikers, and runners—in the individual disciplines—but the question would be whether Ricci could turn these single sport specialists into all-around triathletes.
“Starting out, we knew we had a number of good runners that were just getting started in swimming,” Ricci explained. “A 36 minute 10k means nothing if you swim 35 minutes [for 1.5k] and that was pretty much where we were for three guys who ultimately finished in our top five. I asked a few of the athletes to swim every day over winter break and this seemed to work well. A few of them made some nice improvements in the swim and I felt better about that, but they still needed race experience.”