Introduction
The track & field season has always been a unique one, in the realm of college sports. The student-athletes are practicing from the very beginning of the school year and over the next six months they put in countless hours of training to prepare for just nine spring competitions. The first of those competitions will be this Saturday, Feb. 28th, when PLNU travel to compete in the CMS Rossi Relay to open its 2015 season.
 
Training
The team first met on the track in early September to begin their preparation for the season. The track was resurfaced during the Winter break and the early part of the Spring semester which caused some changes in the training schedule, but greatly improved the track surface, along with the addition of new pole vault and jump pits.
 
"Training has been going real well once we got back able to get on the track and the new facility is excellent," said Point Loma head coach Jerry Arvin. "We're back in the regular track mode which is very, very good for us. We are a very young team with only four seniors back. We're hoping to be a quality team this season but the future is probably where we're heading, and the future looks bright."
 
The Seniors
As coach Arvin mentioned it is a very young PLNU team. In addition to the four seniors, Alexia Avila, Soliaana Faapouli, Emily Loogman and Chloe Soremekun, Point Loma returned just 16 letterwinners off the 2014 team. Loogman and Faapouli both won individual titles at the 2014 Pacific West Conference Championships, in the heptathlon and shot put, respectively.
 
"I think that the quality of the girls we have with our seniors is very, very strong," Arvin explained. "They are great leaders and they've shown over the past couple years that they can compete well even at a high level. They're going to help the younger girls understand what is at stake and how hard it is to compete, not only at our level, but at the DII level but in Southern California. The quality of these four seniors is very good."
 
Team Strengths
The strength of this Point Loma Sea Lions team should lay with its senior group, but PLNU also has talent and depth throughout its roster in a number of track & field events, so there are a lot of possibilities and hope coming into the season.
 
"Chloe in the triple jump, the pole vaulters, Soli in the throws, Emily 400 hurdles and our distance girls should all be strengths for this team," Arvin explained. "I expect that all have grown a little (during the offseason) so we would have been a little stronger in all those events."
 
While the Sea Lions can point to certain areas as strengths of the team, they also realize they will need to have student-athletes continue to improve their performances in these other areas.
 
"We're not sure what we're going to have in the sprints or the relays (this year)," Arvin said. "We're going to count on some of the freshmen to help us along and see what happens there."
 
Goals
This is a unique season for the Point Loma track & field program, as it will not have a conference meet to look forward to with the PacWest Championships taking a one-year hiatus. Even without the this 'pinnacle' meet to shoot for at the end of the season, coach Arvin has outlined a number of goals for his Sea Lion team.
 
"Given our ability level and what I've seen I want to be able to run better in the 4x400 relay," Arvin said. "Each girl need to run a 59 which is a big jump down for us. We also need our 400 hurdle girls to perform well and to get our pole vault girls to be able to vault at the height we believe that they're capable of. If they can go ahead and do that it'll big for us.  Also whomever else we can get to move toward their personal best is going to end up being valuable, not only for the team, but also themselves."
 
The schedule
PLNU has nine competitions schedule for this season, including five in the San Diego area. 
 
"Typically the schedule builds around the conference championship and then we work backwards," Arvin said. "This year with no conference meet we've decided the Triton Invitational will kind of be our composite meet and everybody will hopefully have their best meet at that meet. We'll use the other meets to get our feet wet and also for the coaching staff to say this person can do 'this.' We've got this, we need to work on this so it's just the beginning a different day than practice only because we're in team uniforms otherwise I look at it as another practice day and another day to evaluate the girls."
 
Home Meets
As part of its nine-match schedule, Point Loma will host a pair of meets. On March 21st they will host the third annual Ross & Sharon Irwin Collegiate Scoring Meet and on March 28th they will host the 8th Annual PLNU Track & Field Invitational.
 
"We got into the home meet business for lots of reasons," Arvin explained. "The first is we have one of the best facilities in the United States, with the view, the weather and the new facilities. There are plenty of schools in California and around that want to come here. We picked those dates in part because they coincide with most schools spring breaks; we even have East coast schools coming. The meets have grown into a minimum of 500 and maximum of 800 so they turn out to be really good meets, it's a lot of work but does turn out to be some of the best meets for us all year.
 
"Our teams have always like the home meets be able to be leisurely and use a little bit of a home course advantage," he added. "They've got their own place to go and warm up, they know what they're doing and they know that a lot of their family and college friends will come to watch them compete. That's one of the nice things about track as opposed to other sports generally you know if you're going to watch you get to see your friends compete."
 
Challenges for the team this season
"We need to get better and we need to understand the level of competition we have to compete against in the conference and where we have to step up to compete at the national level," Arvin explained. "Five six years ago before we made the switch (to NCAA Division II) we pretty much figured that out and we were consistently a top 10 team in the NAIA and we were doing it with a lot of people. Well that doesn't translate into NCAA DII, which means we have to adapt change and that's not easy.
 
"We have a lot of work to do if we're going to get there," Arvin explained. "But our biggest challenge is making sure that the girls on the team have a great experience and that they get better at what they're doing, so they feel good about themselves and the way they represent the school.
 
"We want the personal excellence of all thirty girls, and hopefully that comes out as team excellence," he continued. "We have to encourage those returners to get better and that's going to fall on the seniors to help them understand what that journey's like because if you look at our seniors when they were freshmen, they're not the same athletes now as they were then. They're much better, and they have to help them understand that growth before they get frustrated and say I can't do this. It all starts with if you love the sport. If you love the sport you're going to compete and strive for excellence."
 
Conclusion
The team aspect in track & field has allowed individuals to continue to work and compete for individual marks and times but to be playing for something beyond themselves; their teammates and their school. This year without the PacWest Championships the Sea Lions will not have as many chances to come together to compete for the name on the front of their uniforms but instead will be relying even more on individual performances and continued improvement to measure success this season.