Benefield: Sonoma State University's women's track and field team makes its return

Sonoma State’s Tori Dwyer has the second-fastest steeplechase time in school history. Impressive, yes. More impressive? She posted that time without ever practicing on her home track’s barriers and water pit.

The Sonoma State track’s water pit? Filled with rocks. Across the track, the pole vault boxes are paved over in concrete. The long jump pit? A tangle of weeds enmeshed in hard-as-a-rock sand. Unusable.

Such is the state of things for the Seawolves women’s track and field team, whose return to Sonoma State’s list of sanctioned sports was announced last June but only hit the ground running this spring.

The team, and the athletic department, is caught in a bit of numbers game. Yes, the team was reinstated this season after being mothballed in 2007, but it’s hard not to see the squad as something of a neglected stepchild, brought into the fold of SSU athletics but not entirely. Not yet.

Here’s how it happened.

The women’s track team was axed in 2007, presumably to make room for women’s golf. But school officials brought it back this season primarily to comply with Title IX, the measure that outlawed sex discrimination in educational institutions receiving federal funding. The gist: Six out of 10 SSU students are female, so six out of 10 roster spots on sanctioned teams must be filled by women.

It’s termed Title IX’s rule of proportionality. Schools must oblige or else.

“You have to be within 1 percent of your female and male student body enrollment,” Sonoma State athletic director Bill Fusco said. “It happens all the time. It’s just how our system is. A lot of schools do this because of the enrollment imbalance.”

Sonoma State was drifting afoul of that requirement, so officials announced the return of women’s track and field. It was the sport that made the most sense.

The result? SSU now fields nine women’s teams and slightly more than 61 percent - a total of 179 - of all student athletes are SSU are women, according to Fusco. On the other side of the ledger, or locker room as the case may be, there are five men’s teams on campus and 111 male student athletes.

Title IX requirements have turned roster management into a science. At SSU, women’s teams are encouraged to carry large squads, while men’s teams are cutting people to remain true to enrollment ratios.

It’s a tough business telling coaches how many players they should and, sometimes, must, carry. Fusco acknowledges the tension.

“There is a lot that goes into it,” he said. “There is a lot of emotion.”

Fusco said the addition of women’s track should ease pressure on other women’s squads to carry large rosters. Women’s soccer had 38 athletes this fall, according to Fusco. That calls for a pretty long bench. The addition of women’s track might also give men’s teams some breathing room to carry a few more athletes. But some of that remains to be seen.

But for all the number-crunching and box-checking that goes on behind the scenes, members of the Seawolves track team are stoked to be running and throwing in SSU colors.

“Definitely the practices are a big change. Now we practice every single day, twice a day,” said junior Maria Hurtado, team captain for both the track and the cross-country squads.

Track was the best candidate to add to the rolls because Sonoma State had a nearly ready-made squad in its women’s cross-country team. These are, after all, athletes who were often doing spring workouts together anyway, albeit on a much more casual schedule. Now they get to go full out: Coaches, set practice times, priority registration and facilities.

But about those facilities.

The first trick is to find the track. Think behind the berms that mark the western and southern edges of campus.

The painted “SSU” at the ?50-yard mark is nearly worn away. The track is threadbare and rock hard. I’m not sure there were bathrooms in the neighborhood. Fusco called the facilities “a liability from a recruiting standpoint.”

“It’s literally almost the same thing as running on cement,” said Angelique Lopez, a sophomore who ran prep track at Vintage High in Napa.

Dwyer said she looks at the faltering facilities as a positive. No water pit? Dwyer focuses on her pace rather than jump technique.

“I have to push myself that much harder. I have to make sure everything else is that much better,” she said.

That’s the easygoing outlook that marks the Seawolves women’s track team in its first year back. This is, after all, a team that found a javelin thrower in a CrossFit gym.

“She said ‘You go to Sonoma State and you are strong,’” senior Alyssa Garcia remembers of throwing coach Kristina Sisseck’s pitch. “I didn’t even know what a track was.”

Garcia is exaggerating. She played Junior Olympic softball and expected natural strength and athleticism to bridge the gap of experience.

“It looked like an opportunity I’d never have again,” she said. She’s now an NCAA Division II athlete.

Head coach Sean Fitzpatrick sees the establishment of a track team as an opportunity, too. As head coach of the SSU cross-country team, he lost ground each season because rules restrict the number of hours athletes can work out in the “offseason.” With track now in place, this is no longer the offseason. He can keep working with runners through the school year.

He’d lost recruits in years past when cross-country athletes wanted to attend a college with cross-country in the fall and track in the spring.

So SSU’s careful balancing act could become a boon for women’s cross-country and track athletes.

Now, about those facilities …

You can reach staff columnist Kerry Benefield at 526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com, on Twitter @benefield and on Instagram at kerry.benefield.