By Wendell Barnhouse | wendell@big12sports.com
Big12Sports.com Correspondent
The start of the two-day Big 12 Indoor
Track and Field Championships have been postponed because of winter storm Q.
Originally scheduled to start Friday, the competition has been moved back to
Saturday and will end Sunday.
Big 12 Conference athletic directors
voted unanimously Thursday night to postpone the meet, which is being hosted by
Iowa State. The competition will follow the original schedule.
The storm dumped up to a foot of snow
around the Kansas City area Thursday morning and later in the day moved into
Iowa and snowfalls of three to five inches were reported in the Ames area. Nine
schools were able to make it Ames Thursday.
Oklahoma State anticipated travel
problems and departed Stillwater by bus Wednesday but wound up driving into the
storm. It took them seven hours to travel a distance that should have taken
half that time. The team made it as far as Topeka, Kans., at 2:30 a.m. but was
stranded their all day Thursday.
The athletic directors faced two
options. They could have held the meet as scheduled and Oklahoma State would
not have been able to compete. The second option was to reschedule by postponing the
competition for a day. Neither option was perfect.
By postponing the meet, student-athletes
will now miss some class time Monday. Plus schools that made travel plans to
return to campus Sunday will now have to reschedule flights - an expensive
proposition.
Another problem created by postponing
the competition is that some of the officials scheduled to work the meet have
other obligations on Sunday. Big 12 staff and Iowa State administrators are
working to resolve that problem.
Baylor was fortunate to make it to Ames.
The school's original itinerary had it flying to Kansas City Thursday - MCI
airport closed around noon. Anticipating problems with the storm, Baylor rescheduled.
The team left Waco at 3:15 a.m. by bus for DFW and flew to Minneapolis on a
7:20 a.m. flight and then bussed to Ames, arriving at 1:45 p.m.
Iowa State's indoor track facility will
be available for the teams to practice on Friday.