bleedCrimson.net will be conducting interviews with Aggie women's track and field head coach Orin Richburg throughout the 2008 season as Coach Richburg builds the Aggie track and field program. In this week's interview Coach Richburg recaps the Aggies' performance in El Paso last weekend and talks about what he wants his team to improve on as they head into the UTEP Invitational in two weeks.

bleedCrimson.net: Can you talk about this past weekend. You had a couple girls set school records in the meet in El Paso.
Orin Richburg: You have a couple of young ladies doing a decent job in Jordan Veney and Devin Brooks. We still have work to do in terms of overall as a team. We've got to get a little more consistency in what we're doing. We've got to get our young ladies to understand the importance of every effort is a maximum effort in terms of what we need to do to be a little bit more successful. We had a couple of decent performances but we've got to be able to get a little bit more out of the rest of the team, we can't continue to have four or five people carry us if we carry 25 or 30 people to a meet. We've got to try to get a little bit bigger involvement from the rest of the team.

Jordan [Veney] set a new school record in the discus and Devin [Brooks] ran a 14.36 for the hurdles which is fairly decent but we still have quite a ways to go overall as a team. You just hope that we get some other performances. Ingrid Flores did a good job in the 3000m, we've still got to get a little bit more consistency out of the rest of the team and let the young ladies know what it is to compete at a high level. We can't go in and compete at a high level one day and drop down and then come back and do that a week later. We've have to work a little more consistently as a team and hope that we can get them to understand it's just an effort, you train hard and when you go to a competition you compete hard.

We had a couple of young ladies had pretty good performances when it was a regional qualifier and set a couple of records there. The thing about it, we have to have more than that out of the team. We're traveling with 25-30 young ladies and to only come back with a few decent marks is not where we need to be. We need to be able to compete the way we train and not being intimidated by any of the factors that we might come up against.

bc.net: Can you talk a little bit about the UTEP Invitational in a couple of weeks.
OR: It's a close meet, again we will take some of the same people we took this past weekend there and hope that we can go down and let them understand that it's close to home and this is our back yard and we have to go down there and compete at a high level so that any potential recruits in the area know that we do have a pretty good team that they would want to be a part of. So we can't go in and not compete at that level that we can attract other young ladies to come into our program. We have a little bit of work to do in terms of getting the young ladies to understand what we are and where we have to go. We're hoping that we can get a little bit more consistency out of the team and a little bit better performance out of the team.

bc.net: What improvements have you seen from your team from the meet in Arizona to the meet last week?
OR: The first weekend that we went down to Arizona for the first meet we had some good performances across the board. And being close to home even though it was Spring Break but Spring Break shouldn't make a difference in how you compete. Last week's performances didn't measure up to the first weekend's performances. There has to be something there, we had Spring Break and so basically that gave them a chance to not have to worry about classes but we didn't get the kind of performances we should have gotten on a weekend where you didn't have to worry about classes. The weekend in Arizona was a pretty good week for us and last week we had a couple of decent performances but not what we're looking for as a staff and as a team. We have to be able to put good marks on the board week in and week out if we're going to go any place in the WAC conference.