The first thing you see after the hour and a half bus ride from Triton to the Reggie Lewis Center is a crowd of track athletes waiting in the cold to be let inside. When you get inside, you are greeted by poor air quality. It is so hot inside that athletes are  sweating before even starting to warm up.

After a traffic filled bus ride, you go inside and then put your stuff down in the bleachers. Then you begin warming up for your event. The whole place feels disorganized.  Junior Cooper Campbell described it as chaotic, “There are always people standing around in the way.” 

The Reggie Lewis center is named after former Celtics player Reggie Lewis. It is an indoor track on the Roxbury Community College campus. 

I run the 55 meter dash and throw the shot put which happens simultaneously.  I signed in for shot put then went to do the 55. There are many schools at the meets so for each event there are many heats. As soon as I finished running the 55, I went over to throw the shot put. Since there were so many heats for the 55, I had missed my flight for the shot put. The official running the shot put was not happy with me even though I had come as soon as I could. He let me do my three throws but he didn’t let me warm up before so I didn’t do well.

The surface of the track at Reggie Lewis is made out of rubber and is similar to a carpet. Track athletes wear spiked shoes to give them extra traction. While running at Reggie Lewis Center you aren’t allowed to have your spikes in. This has caused many people to slip at the start of their races. 

         The bus leaves an hour after school so most people stay after school. The meets start at 5:30 and don’t get done until about 9:30. The bus arrives back at school around 10:30.  That makes for a long 15 hour day. “It’s like another school day on top of school.” said junior Sam Mollineaux. The meets are four hours long so once you get done with your events, you spend a lot of time waiting around.

While it is a pain to get down to Roxbury after school, the track team is lucky to have somewhere to run. if we didn’t go to Reggie then we couldn’t compete at all. Even if you don’t win your event, it is still fun to have a little bit of competition. Once you have done your events, you can hang out with your teammates and watch the races. On the bus rides, you can sit with friends and listen to music.

Running at the Reggie Lewis center isn’t the greatest due to the long bus rides and disorganization but having meets there is preferable to not having meets at all.