Intuit said:
Does the site have sufficient resources to produce an interview with the new T & F Director? It would be interesting to learn about her initial organizational actions and strategy. Will she discuss her plans to overcome the team's competitive performance shortfall. How will she allocate her resources and scholarships to attract and build a team that can complete in all the events? Does she believe spreading out partial scholarships is the best way to run the program? What will be the impact on the team if they loose access to Edwards stadium?
Excellent points!
I have 2 questions and they kind of go hand-in-hand with one another and dove-tail with yours.
My first question would be to ask how many scholarships does she have to work with.
Cal has never been a fully-funded program and has been well short of the maximum number of scholies allowed by the NCAA of 12.6 men and 18 for women. Is the new AD committed to fully funding T&F?
Sandy Barbour maintained that she wanted to be competitive at not just the conference level, but a NATIONAL level. Well that was pure BS because Cal has only been competitive at the national level once during the last two head coaches and that was in 2007 when all of the "stars were aligned" for Coach Chris Huffins in Sacramento with the women finishing at #8. Since then, there has been one bottom of the conference finish after another by both sides of the team... never mind at a National level.
My second question would be one of strategy.
Will the program continue to try and field a "balanced" team or one that would specialize in just a couple of disciplines, such as jumps and throws?
It never really made sense to me to try and run a "balanced" program given the lack of scholarship dollars and/or high profile coaches on staff. At times, I believe that Coach Sandoval had made an "effort" to not run a balanced program, but I don't think he was ever fully committed to that. There had been some "experiments" made along the way (such as in the pole vault and throws), but this would be my first question of Coach Johnson.
