Patience of track and field athletes wears thin as FIU looks to make facility improvements

Andrea Loizidou is a mathematics master’s student and track runner at FIU. She’s from Cyprus — a country just south of Turkey, 6,393 miles from Miami.

The track she runs on is a lot closer, but it’s still a journey to get there.

Despite being the second-largest sport at FIU by participation, men’s and women’s track and field teams don’t have a track to practice on campus.

Instead, members of both teams have to commute to Tropical Park, about four miles south of the Modesto Maidique Campus.

Leonarda Farkas, a senior marketing student and a member of cross-country and track and field, described the off-campus trek.

“When we have workouts that actually require a track, we drive to Tropical Park, which is a public track. And that’s also really complicated because sometimes we don’t even have vans to transport all of us to the track,” said Farkas. “Sometimes, it’s 5:30, we’re standing in front of the football stadium, and our coach just tells us ‘Guys, I don’t have any vans today, we need to figure it out.’ And half of the team is international, so we don’t even have cars there.”

Farkas also recounts the time that the team ran into trouble with law enforcement during one of their visits to the Tropical Park track after hours.

“We had to jump the fence. So we got caught by police but then my coach spoke to them, explained that we are the FIU track and field team, and because we don’t have tracks, we practice here.”

Eliseo Torres, an accounting graduate student and a five-year member of the men’s track team, recalls the time that they had to break into the track as well.

“We had to use a trash can in order to jump over,” he said.

It wasn’t always like this. The Modesto Maidique Campus used to have a track included with its football stadium, but that was demolished when the stadium was renovated and expanded from 2006 to 2008.

Plans to build a new track were made but have yet to be fulfilled, such as one in 2019 as part of FIU’s Next Horizons campaign.

Torres and other members of the men’s team have tried to speak to coach Ryan Heberling but to no avail. They then went to athletic director Scott Carr, only to be redirected back to their coach by an assistant.

When Loizidou brought up her concerns regarding the lack of a track on campus, she said she was told that there isn’t space for it and any space available was instead being designated for a swimming pool, a facility already located at Biscayne Bay Campus.

Carr, who began as athletic director just under two years ago, later spoke to reporters about plans for improvement. He said he has s had track and field improvements on his radar since starting. Carr was unaware that FIU lacked a track when he initially took the job.

“There’s a lot of facilities that we need to do things with, but obviously to have a track for our student-athletes is it is definitely a high priority,” Carr said.

The logistics are tricky: on-campus land for a standard-size track is scarce, construction takes time and the price tag could be anywhere between $6 million to $20 million, Carr estimates.

“A year ago, the university actually approved $2.5 million to help us with a track,” Carr said. “They identified that a track would be great for campus, would be great for athletics.”

“But two and a half compared to that $6 [million] to $20 million: there’s still a gap there.”

Getting a pool on the main campus is also a priority for athletics and one that might compete with getting a track.

“I’m not going to say either one of them is easy, or easier: a pool is a smaller footprint, a pool takes up less space,” said Carr, emphasizing that having both is important to him and FIU’s trustees.

“We’re several months away from having a completed facility master plan, that of course will include a track,” said Carr. “The wheels are turning hugely in motion on both of those items: the location, the actual facility itself, working with the sports architects, and we’ve already secured some funding.”

In the meantime, Carr hopes to address some of the interim issues for runners. In regards to problems at Tropical Park and with transportation, he said some of those were simply breakdowns in communication between athletics staff and the park.

“I know that we’ve put adequate money in the budget for vans for year round,” he added, noting the transportation issues.”

However, not having a track currently is not just an inconvenience for runners — not having standard facilities on campus presents recruiting issues.

Though Carr believes recruitment should be strategic, highlighting the benefits of going to school in Miami and looking for athletes such as long-distance runners who might not need a track, he conceded a track would certainly help with securing talent.

“Since we don’t have a good stadium, we don’t get to recruit fast people because fast people want to go to a school that has a stadium,” Loizidou said. “They want nice facilities that are going to help them improve.”

Runners say that without a track, recruiting the best talent has been hard.

“We can’t really bring good athletes who are thinking of going professional later in the future to FIU because of our lack of tracks,” Farka saids. “I’ve been talking to some of my teammates from Croatia that want to go to the States and they said ‘Yeah, we’d like to come to FIU, but there’s no track and we can’t really improve.

“That’s a big minus for us.”

The absence of a track to practice on may be the team’s most noticeable issue, but it certainly hasn’t been their only one.

Carr said that nationally, schools have had trouble hiring and keeping athletic trainers — and FIU hasn’t been immune to that issue.

“The athletic trainer is excellent,” Loizidou said. “He cares so much about us but at the same time he has so many people to care about and he has so much on his plate.”

Four sports, including track and field, shared the same athletic trainer, Javier Garcia, which has resulted in athletes not having enough time to speak with him.

“We have one athletic trainer and with track, there’s always something wrong. We’re always injured and we have problems with this or that and we need treatment,” Farkas said.

Carr said for the new year, athletics is closer to being fully staffed and the track and field and cross-country trainer will not have to work with other sports and can focus on runners.

Some facilities, like hydrotherapy tubs and the underwater treadmill, have been broken in the past. Carr said he identified those as issues early on.

“For a while, the ice bath had this weird green color, like the water was green… I couldn’t even take an ice bath because the water wasn’t clean for a while,” said Loizidou. “And also for the runners, in the past, they used to have the treadmill in the water. It broke down like four or five years ago but they never fixed it.”

Farkas and Torres confirmed that the water inside the team’s ice bath was discolored for an extended period of time.

Carr said that regardless of what the tubs look like, they were safe to use.

“I know our athletic trainers well enough to know that they would not have our student-athletes getting into water that was not sanitary,” Carr said. “If there was a two- or three-week period where a hot tub or a cold tub was broken, maybe it didn’t look as good or whatever, when it was fixed, they were going to be very sanitary.”

But help has arrived as new tubs were installed and soon will be available to all athletes. In regards to the treadmill, he would like to update it entirely with a new out-of-water antigravity treadmill

“That’s a piece of equipment that we’ve got earmarked again, going back months ago when we were working on the budget,” said Carr.

In the hydrotherapy room, old in-floor tubs have already been removed, above-ground tubs installed, and floor and paint updated.

Track and field athletes say they are also often kicked out of the weight room by other teams even when it’s their time to use it.

“Sometimes, the weight room is just packed. Most of the time they’re going to tell us ‘Hey you guys need to move.’ It’s happened multiple times,” Loizidou said.

Though athletes will continue sharing the space in the Kirk R. Landon Fieldhouse in the near future, Carr showed off plans from 2016 to renovate the racquetball rooms in the Ocean Bank Convocation Center into new weight rooms — about 3,400 square feet along with the current 14,000 square feet in the Fieldhouse.

“What that’s going to do is that’s going to take some stress off of the other weight room,” Carr said. “We want to help all of our student-athletes. ... It will take some scheduling pressure off of the Landon Fieldhouse weight room.”

In spring 2023, athletics received a $2 million donation from three anonymous donors as well as $500,000 from FIU Board of Trustees member Carlos Duart and wife Tina Vidal-Duart, who is an FIU Foundation Board of Directors member.

Though some of the money was specifically for football updates, Carr was able to use parts of it for general updates to athletics facilities like the hydrotherapy tubs.

And, while there have been issues with the locker rooms, some upgrades were made to the women’s track and field locker room (along with other teams like men’s and women’s soccer and volleyball).

Carr added that they still have yet to do any updates to the men’s track and field locker room, but that they’re planning to add some other upgrades to the women’s locker room such as a TV and redoing lockers so teammates aren’t sharing.

However, students argue that the treatment they have received in the past isn’t Division I level.

“You don’t get the vibe that it’s a DI school. It doesn’t get you excited, it’s just an old locker room,” said Loizidou.

These problems took a mental toll on Loizidou, who was dealing with a foot fracture last spring that sidelined her for a considerable portion of the season.

“I broke down mentally,” said Loizidou. “I’ve been trying so hard because I was in perfect shape before I got injured; I’ve been trying so hard and I got injured and I haven’t been treated right and I’m just going to stop.”

Despite track’s continued success at the Conference USA and NCAA tournament level, the team feels they have yet to earn the same recognition when compared to the other sports.

“It’s sad that we have to fight for something we deserve. If we’re asking for a full scholarship, okay, I get it. But you’re fighting for the bare minimum,” said Torres.

Carr said there’s a lot to get done to meet the needs of student-athletes and improve facilities. But, he intends to reach his goals.

“What our track student-athletes are talking about and wanting is the same thing that I’m talking about and wanting as well,” said Carr.

“We need to keep moving the needle, but that’s the goal.”

Follow Brian Olmo on Twitter at @Brian_Olmo11

PantherNOW staff William Duval and Elise Gregg contributed to this report.