On Saturday, February 17, 2018, the Raven U-Sport Last Chance Invitational Track & Field Meet was held in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. This event was made for athletes as the last chance to improve their ranking and represent their university at the provincial championship to be held the following weekend (February 23-24th). For the provincials, Carleton University will be competing on the Quebec side and the University of Ottawa will be competing in Ontario. The big deal for this Last Chance Invitational is that only the top three in each event for female and male are selected if they make the standard which is the minimum required for each event.
This can be a stressful event for students, happy times for some, disappointments for others. Achieving a Personal Best (PB) may guarantee a position, albeit some really talented athletes (more or less guaranteed to make the team) may not have wanted to be at their best during this meet but at the following provincial meet. That said, two weeks after the provincial meet is the national championship when the athletes have to be even better, competing for the best of the best.
Some athletes may stop training from now on because they were not selected to advance to the provincials, yet other athletes may take it more seriously and plan to work harder for next year or for this upcoming summer for provincial or national all categories (non university). What you see during these early meets are first year university athletes that do not perform very well because they may lack the experience learned from better nutrition, stress management, balancing their school work, and maintaining their practice / work out regimens. Injuries are mainly the worst factor during the September to February training period, a very short time to prepare an athlete who has not trained during the previous summer which is very often the case with new athletes Anxious to increase their time performance new athletes may work too hard and get injured a couple weeks or days before a major competition. The final nominations, hence, are mainly experienced second, third, and fourth year university students, and well equipped for the travels to the meets ahead.
Many thanks to UOttawa Gee-Gees track coach Normand Seguin for assisting me with this blog entry. Normand was happy to report that many of his athletes performed very well at this meet and will be advancing to the provincial championships. If you haven’t done so, have a peek at the blog entry on Normand’s autumn track practice with the uOttawa Gee-Gees.
The inside lighting conditions were pretty bad, and for you photographers, I was shooting highest ISO possible at 6400 on my D800, and aperture priority at f/2.8 with my Nikon 70-200mm.
Please note: All photographs are copyrighted © by Robbie Morrison, 2018.
Track Events
Field Events
