History of the Indoor Classic
Written by: Mike Newman,
DyeStat Illinois
Additional info: Randy
Anderson, Illinois Top Times
The first IPTT Classic was
contested in 1989. There were, however, many more events that led up to the
first meet.
There has always been a high
interest in track & field in the state of Illinois. The interest was taken
to a different level in 1970 when the track & field newsletter Timely Times
was first published. The newsletter was created by the Keen family in Riverside.
The Keen boys had just started competing in track and cross country. The
parents decided to come out with the newsletter that would highlight the top
weekly performances by athletes throughout the state, results of the meets, and
a leaderboard with the top 50 performances in each event. In the fall, the top
50 list was replaced by a weekly coach’s team poll. Timely Times was a mailbox
must check every Tuesday or Wednesday seeing what your competitors did or where
you were ranked.
What
you see know on the internet now was inspired from what the Keen family
developed.
In 1978, Coach Larry
Wieczorek, then coach of Proviso West and now the XC / track coach at the
University of Iowa, saw the interest of track in Illinois and built the Proviso
West Classic with the help of Coach George Paulk of Wheaton-Warrenville High
School.
The event was held at the end
of March and was held on the 200-meter indoor track at Proviso West High School
in Hillside. Most of the top athletes in the state were invited to the meet
which was held on a Friday evening.
The
meet was held for seven years ending after the 1984 meet when Wieczorek went to
Iowa. For the next couple of years, there were end of year indoor invitational
but they were not like the Proviso West Classic.
At the end of the 1986 cross
country season, the Keen family decided to stop publishing Timely Times. Seeing
the need for a track publication, Mike Stine and Marty Bee of Naperville
carried on the tradition of Timely Times by creating Illinois Prep Top Times. In
1989, the two coaches saw the need for an indoor “state meet” and created the
IPTT Classic. The meet was held at the University of Illinois Armory from 1989
to 2005.
Just
like the Keen family before them, Stine and Bee handed over the reins of
Illinois Prep Top Times to two Chicago Public League Coaches, Bob Geiger of
Whitney Young and Tony Jones of Lane Tech in the fall of 2003. The two coaches
upgraded Illinois Prep Top Times to one of the prominent high school running
sites in the state of Illinois. Jones and Geiger joined up with John Dye and
became the editors for Dyestat Illinois until 2012.
The IPTT Classic was moved
from Champaign to the new Shirk Center on the campus of Illinois Wesleyan
University in Bloomington in 2006 where the meet is currently contested. The
meet took different shapes similar to what the IHSA was going through. When the
IHSA expanded track & field to 3 classes, the meet mirrored the change. The
meet was also moved from Saturday to a more suitable format of being held on
Friday night and Saturday.
Geiger and Jones stepped down
at the end of 2012. the Illinois Prep Top Times was taken over by Randy
Anderson of Clinton and Roland Brent of Bloomington and Dan Andrews. With the
help of Marchan Adkins, the tradition continued. The quartet has
renamed the meet the Illinois Top Times High School Track & Field Indoor
Championship. The name may be different but the mission started by Bee and
Stine and continued by Geiger and Jones remains the same to produce a premier
indoor meet for athletes and coaches that will help promote collegiate
recruiting and future participation of Illinois High School athletes.
In 2013 the trio came up with one of the first High School Leadership boards in
the Country very similar to the TFFR site for College athletes. This leadership
board was created by Dan Andrews. We also debuted a complete new website (www.illinoistoptimes.com)
with the leadership board online. In 2014 Roland Brent's job at
State Farm transferred him to Texas and at the end of that season Roland
stepped aside. Also in 2014 we teamed up with Direct Athletics to update our
leadership board to mirror the TFFR site even more since it was created by
Direct Athletics. This made the Illinois Top Times meet one of the largest and
most digitally advanced meet in the county.
In 2015 they raised the bar again, and brought in Runnerspace with
live streaming video and video on demand. This gave the athletes more
exposure to college coaches and track enthusiasts across the country. At
the end of the 2015 season, Dan Andrews had an opportunity to follow his dream
and is coaching at Milliken University. His role has changed a little and
he now sub-contracts as their Technical Director. The mission since Randy
Anderson has been a part of Illinois Top Times remains the same: To produce a
premier indoor championship meet for athletes and coaches that would help
promote collegiate recruiting and future participation from Illinois high school
athletes.
