DC Track to combine training and service on spring trip

DEFIANCE, Ohio—Four members of the Defiance College Track & Field squad will be training and competing at Fresno State University over spring break while also serving as fitness ambassadors to a Fresno-area elementary school.

Yellow Jacket athletes, including Eric Nicely, Matt Fosnaugh, Eric Swartz, and Steve Langley, will compete and train at Warmerdam Field, the home of the FSU Bulldogs. Nicely, the DC pole-vault record holder, and Fosnaugh will train with DC head coach Matt Lydum and Fresno’s legendary head coach, Bob Fraley, a member of the Pole Vault Hall of Fame who has recently been named ‘National Coach of the Year’ by both the United States Olympic Committee and USA Track & Field.

Meanwhile, Langley and Swartz, the DC school-record holder in the indoor pentathalon, will compete in a two-day decathalon competition against the NCAA Division-I Bulldogs and other valley-area athletes.

Along with the world-class training and competition experience, the four Yellow Jackets will engage in a community outreach project involving Winchell Elementary School in Fresno. Defiance College Track & Field’s Youth Athletic Outreach project is an ongoing effort by the Yellow Jackets to promote physical fitness to elementary students in the Defiance area and now across the nation. Winchell, a predominantly Hispanic school with 52% of its students still learning English, is among many California schools that have eliminated physical education in order to focus on training for high-stakes standardized tests.

On Monday and Tuesday, March 13 and 14, Nicely, Fosnaugh, Swartz, and Langley will design a fitness curriculum for third-through-sixth grade students at Winchell and implement an appropriate intervention based upon physical culture, human development, social justice, and physical education pedagogy. The elementary students and teachers will be exposed to fun, safe movements that can be done in large groups with little or no equipment. The program is intended to teach an approach to physical activity that can be maintained for a lifetime.

The Youth Athletic Outreach program is based on Lydum’s research findings that without organized physical education, many children, such as those at Winchell, have very limited access to physical activity. Along with cuts in physical education curriculum, youth sport is becoming increasingly elitist with the emergence of ‘pay-to-play’ and club sport programs. A result of these barriers is the childhood obesity epidemic, to which emigrant children are especially susceptible. This epidemic is related to negative health consequences such as diabetes, cognitive disorders, sleep apnea, cancer, and cardiovascular disease.

The Yellow Jackets depart for Fresno on Sunday, March 12 and will return on Thursday, March 16.

For more information on the Youth Athletic Outreach program, visit www.defiance.edu/athletics/track_field_instruction.html.