It’s been a while since the Concordia College track and field teams have run a meet.As their MIAC rivals have gotten their outdoor seasons underway either in sunny climes or in the chilly Midwest in the recent weeks, the Cobbers, who of course make their homes in soggy Moorhead, have been forced to scrap three outdoor meets this season.
The Cobbers appeared set to finally open their season today in Fargo, but the North Dakota State’s Bison Open was cancelled late Monday as Moorhead’s sister city recovers from recent flooding and prepares for a second crest of the Red River later this month.
When flood waters approached what turned out to be a record crest earlier this month, the Concordia thinclads actually shut down their season completely. Forced from campus due to the rising waters, Cobber coaches Marv Roeske and Garrick Larson encouraged their teams to put sport aside and pitch in with the city’s sandbagging effort.
As Larson wrote to the teams in an e-mail during the height of the flood: “ … practice will continue to be sandbagging until further notice."
While things are more normal at Concordia now – the campus is open, classes have been back in session since Monday, and track practices are back on schedule – the community still braces for that second crest. The latest flood forecast released this morning has lowered the predicted height of a second flood crest later this month.
The flood hit especially hard for the dozen or so Cobber athletes who hale from Fargo-Moorhead originally. They campus was threatened but so too were their family homes.
Kristin Slette, for example, an all-MIAC quarter-miler from Moorhead, sandbagged her parents’ house with the help of Cobber teammates.
“Our house has to be sandbagged all the way around because we live on a ‘peninsula,’ so the river comes at us from 3 directions making us an island when the river hits about 36 feet,” Slette a junior Biology major explained. “Thus, the next three days we worked on making a four-foot dike all the way around our house"
Photo: The Slette home during the flood.
After finishing work at her folks’ house, Slette and her teammates spent time helping sandbag other Moorhead homes. Then the authorities predicted an even higher flood crest.
“Once again I was bombarded with calls from my teammates asking if we needed help,” Slette said. “We just finished the top layer on the dike as the river completely covered the road making it impossible to walk down our street. My friends and I ended up having to be canoed back to the road from my house! By the next day it was impossible to get to our house without a boat with a powerful motor because the current was so strong.
In the end, Slette and her parents moved the family’s most valuable possessions to the top floor of the house and evacuated. At roughly the same time, Slette learned they she needed to clear valuables out of her own apartment due to flood fears. Ultimately, she rendezvoused with her family and spent a night with relatives in Detroit Lakes.
Fearing they’ed erred in abandoning the house, however, Slette, her father, her brother, and friends returned home the following day to find four feet of water in the basement. He father and mother stayed with the house after that, maintaining the pumps.
“Training wise, I only ran one day the week that we spent sandbagging because, first of all, helping out not only my family but the rest of the community seemed more important to me than making sure I got every one of my workouts in,” Slette said.
“Also, believe it or not, I was way more exhausted after having sandbagged day after day, than I have ever been during a regular week during track."
And who knows, once Slette and the Cobbers finally get to race in an outdoor meet, they may find that sandbagging will pay dividends on the track.
No comments:
Post a Comment