THE STUDENT VOICE SINCE 1904
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 2010
WWW.KANSAN.COM
VOLUME 123 ISSUE 69
THE FAST TRACK
Alumnus creates collaborative Kenyan runners program
BY NICOLAS ROESLER nroesler@kansan.com
High up in the 7,000-foot altitude of Mount Kenya, running is life. One University alumnus is tapping into the level of success and passion Kenyan runners are made of — both by taking athletes to Africa and by providing ways for them to compete around the world.
Mike Solomon, a 1971 graduate and former track and field athlete, has begun an international training exchange program called Sport Exchange, along with elite trainers and coaches in Kenya. The goal of this new program is to encourage international cohesion on an athletic front.
"I always thought that with the Americans lagging behind in distance running, this was the only way to improve," Solomon said. "To go there and train with their best guys and their national coaches."
Frank Murithi poses between two Kenyan runners. Murithi trains with the runners on Mount Kenya. CONTRIBUTED PHOTO
Gitonga, are trying to harness that success for young American athletes. However, Solomon's friend and fellow University alumnus Dan Waters said the American college athletics system for track and field is the best in the world.
CONTRIBUTED PHOTO
In the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, Kenyans won half of the medals in distances of more than 800 meters, including two gold medals. They also won gold in the marathon, a 25.32 mile run.
Solomon and his colleagues,
Frank Murithi and Lawrence
Waters, who ran track at Kansas between 1990 and 1995 and is now an assistant coach at Texas A&M, said he wouldn't trade the training athletes in the states for any other in the world while in college. It is after college when he thinks Solomon's program would benefit athletes.
Michael Solomon
"In order to beat the best you have to train with the best," Waters said of athletes who are pursuing track and field after college. "So going to Kenya and training with some of the best athletes in the world gives you great exposure and opens your eyes and
your mind as to what it takes to be
"sensitive at the highest level."
"Everything from our climate to our nutrition makes Kenyan runners strong," Murithi said via Skype from Kenya.
type of improvement that is hard to find anywhere else in the world.
Murithi, an athletics manager who has managed and trained multiple Kenyan athletes to international standards, said training in Kenya is more intense than many other parts of the world, and their location and environment foster a
He added that the Kenyan running spirit is contagious to visiting athletes who have trained with him. It might be the completely natural diet and fresh cow milk that the runners drink every morning.
"You'll never want to leave Kenya," Murithi said. "We make you feel like a true Kenyan."
The trouble right now is getting word out to American athletes who are willing to accept Kenya as a temporary home. Solomon said college athletes are so busy year-round with school and sports that taking a semester to go to Africa isn't always possible.
Solomon and Murithi are also involved in obtaining athletic
However, Solomon and Murithi are working with
the United States International University in Nairobi and other universities to establish a sort of study abroad program. This would allow college athletes to train there and miss out on earning credit hours for graduation.
scholarships for Kenyan runners in the United States. In the early 1970s, Solomon began working for the Texas at El Paso track and field team. There, he witnessed one of the first schools in the country to recruit and even fill their roster with foreign athletes, many of them Kenyans.
When he began working at UTEP, they had two or three Kenyan athletes. Now they have 10. There are only 15 athletes from the U.S. on their 41-athlete roster.
Solomon and Murithi said most of the runners in Kenya come from poor families, and running scholarships are one of their only ways out of Kenya. However, many of them return after their education.
"He is offering an opportunity for athletes that are in a country not as developed as the United States and offers them a chance to get a degree from a university here in the states and take it back to their country and possibly help develop it," Waters said of Solomon's and Murithi's program.
gram didn't extend their recruiting efforts to an international level until the late 1980s.
The Kansas track and field team only has four foreign athletes on the team, two from Jamaica and two from Europe. Waters said that the Kansas track and field proto outreach director and creating a new position, the development director. The duties assigned to each position would also change under the restructuring.
Solomon is working on advertising for Sport Exchange here in the states, through different running publications. He has spent the last 10 years traveling between Kenya, Ethiopia and the Middle East promoting Sport Exchange and recruiting athletes.
Sport Exchange has yet to host an American university athlete, but Solomon thinks the inexpensiveness and the value of training with professional athletes will draw athletes in the near future.
The international competitive pace is quickening, and Solomon is trying to keep the United States up to the standard.
Edited by Leslie Kinsman
There's always room for cello
.
Chris Bronson/KANSAM Jinyoung Choi, a doctoral student in cello performance, performs a solo recital at Swarthout Recital Hall in Murphy Hall on Monday night, which fulfilled a partial requirement for her degree. Choi performed songs by Samuel Barber, Bohuslav Martinu, and Sergei Prokofiev at her concert, which was a free, public event.
STUDENT SENATE
Executive staff changes may be delayed
BY MICHAEL HOLTZ mholtz@kansan.com
Student Senator Aaron Harris asked the Court of Appeals for an injunction that would prevent Senate from drafting a proposed bill on Wednesday.
The bill, which was proposed by Student Body President Michael Wade Smith, outlines a plan to restructure the Student Senate Executive Staff.
The Court of Appeals will make a ruling on Harris' request tonight. Senate will have its last meeting of the semester on Wednesday. If the court issues the injunction, Senate will be barred from drafting the bill until mid-January, when classes and Senate resume.
Smith outlined his restructuring plan in front of Senate on Nov. 10. At least three senators raised concerns about his proposed changes at that time, including Harris, a non-traditional senator and junior from Kansas City, Kan. At the meeting, Smith said the restructuring would take effect the following day, but few of the changes have yet occurred.
The proposed changes include combining the community affairs director and legislative director into one position, changing the job title of communications director
According to Smith's interpretation of Senate's Rules and Regulations, the student body president is allowed to change the job descriptions of executive staff members as he or she sees fit. But Harris said the student body president was only allowed to make short-term changes to executive staff. He said legislation was required for the types of permanent changes Smith wanted to implement.
Harris said he wasn't concerned with Smith's proposed changes to the executive staff, but rather Smith's approach to implementing those changes. Harris said formal legislation needed to pass before restructuring could take effect.
"We're taking a very liberal approach to our interpretation and I'll recognize that," Smith said. "But I don't think it's outside of the rules."
Though Smith disagreed with Harris, he agreed to present the legislation needed to formalize the changes.
"It's not a big enough deal for us, if they had concerns, to not present something." Smith said.
ent a bill in late February or early March to solidify the new executive staff structure in Rules and Regulations. Waiting until the spring semester would give the executive staff time to "test the waters," Smith and other staff members said.
Smith originally planned to pres.
"For us to present legislation now would be ineffective and hinder the possibilities of what Alex can do," said Megan Ritter, student body vice president.
Under the restructuring, Atea Earles would become the development director.
In his request to the Court of Appeals, Harris said that if Senate drafted legislation Wednesday, it would legitimize "the illegal actions of the student body president."
None of the four committees reviewed the legislation two weeks ago. Smith would need to move Senate into committee as a whole, a rare procedural tactic, to pass it Wednesday.
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Harris said Smith had already set a dangerous precedent by trying to implement the changes without the Senate's consent. Though Harris supports formal legislation, he said Senate needed more time to make its decision.
"It if came down to that there is enough support," Harris said. "It would pass no problem and no one would think the better of it."
Smith said he would appeal to the University's Judicial Board if the Court of Appeals approved the injunction.
— Edited by Roshni Oommen
INDEX
Basketball ticket pick-up today and Wednesday
- USC
Pick up your tickets for the following games:
Classifieds ... 8A
Crossword ... 4A
Cryptoquips ... 4A
Opinion ... 5A
Sports ... 10A
Sudoku ... 4A
- Texas-Arlington
- Miami
- Miami
- UMKC
- Nebraska
- Nebra: Texas
- texas
- Kansas State
What's on your iPod?
IP0D | 2A
Check out the music that's moving KU this week
WEATHER
TODAY 3919
Partly cloudy/Windy
WEDNESDAY
Sunny
AM Clouds/PM Sun weather.com
THURSDAY 5324
All contents, unless stated otherwise. © 2010 The University Daily Kansan
OPINION | 5A
From Alaskan reality TV star to President Palin?
Adams: Sarah Palin's highprofile endeavors don't qualify her to be Republicans' candidate in 2012.
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