By Cole Strzelecki
The scene is Minnechaug Regional High School’s outdoor track. All across the track, there are college-aged track athletes from Western New England University training for their team’s next meet. Everyone has one common goal: to do their best for their team. But one athlete in particular is thinking a little more than that. He stands out in the track’s throwing ring, thinking about his goals and who he’s doing this for.
Ikechukwu Ogbonnanze, Ike for short, takes a deep breath as he stands in the ring as a senior athlete. Though this is his first year of outdoor track and field at his college, and it’s been years since he last played the sport, Ogbonnanze feels no pressure. He knows he will give his all at this meet and the next one, just as he always has. So he picks up the shotput sitting on the ground nearby and gets in the position to throw.
Ogbonnanze’s experience with track and field started in his sophomore year of high school. At the time, Ogbonnanze was only playing football, but he wanted something to do during the offseason. He was bored during the downtime and wanted something fun that was also athletic to keep him in shape. Luckily, his sister was already involved in his high school’s track team, bridging the gap between this sport and the future WNE star.
“The most I knew about track and field at first was the small things you’d see in the Olympics,” Ogbonnanze began. “But my older sister did it…she was my ride home. So I just started going with her to practice.” After going to a few of his team’s practices, he was convinced by the coach to join the team. “Coach Roy was his name, and he got me interested by telling me how all these football players he used to know were in track and field. He said it was helping them with their footwork and offered them a pastime.” That was just the sort of activity he was looking for, and from there, Ogbonnanze was hooked.
Ogbonnanze took to the sport fast, quickly figuring out the ins and outs of the field-based events. “I’m on the throwing side of the sport,” Ogbonnanze began, “so it was just a matter of repetition and learning the things needed for perfection. Once I mastered that, I started getting perfect scores all the time.” Soon, Ogbonnanze became a star athlete on his high school team. However, his experience with track was more than just gaining a large record.
Alongside scoring big for his school, Ogbonnanze gained some valuable life experiences and friends that he wouldn’t have found if not for track and field. Only having played football, Ogbonnanze had an entirely different experience with sports; one that was more focused on his opponents purely being the enemy. Track and field, on the other hand, offered him a sense of camaraderie, making players on other teams more like rivals.
“It’s more relaxed,” said Ogbonnanze. “You get to know who you’re around more.” Oftentimes, Ogbonnanze would run into players from opposing high school football teams, and with the environment of a track meet, he had the chance to see them in a new light. “It was a four-hour event, and we’d only be doing something for fifteen minutes max. So we got to just talk and chill.”
With experiences like these, Ogbonnanze ended up loving his time on track and field, playing it with his high school’s team through his senior year. He became the school’s best athlete in the discus and shot put events, setting records that remain unbroken today. Life was great for the rising athlete, but unfortunately, great moments such as these can’t last forever.
When Ogbonnanze began applying to colleges, he became very interested in Western New England University. Only this university and Curry College offered him football opportunities, so this university seemed very promising. However, choosing Western New England as his college came with one major downside: there was no track and field team present.
“I still wanted to play football when I got out of high school,” Ogbonnanze explained. “The brotherhood and the familiarity that football brought, I felt it here.” Yet Ogbonnanze still had to sacrifice track and field if he really wanted to play on Western New England University’s team. Though it was a tough decision, he eventually decided to go with WNE, leaving track and field behind him.
During his time at college, Ogbonnanze focused on football. He played every season and trained regularly during the off-season period. He was determined to keep being an athlete in any way possible for many reasons. He wanted to stay fit, he wanted that sense of companionship being on a sports team, but most of all, as he navigated the life of a collegiate athlete, he wanted to be a good role model.
“The reason I first got into football and athletics as a whole was because of my little brother,” Ogbonnanze said. His younger brother looks up to him for the legacy he brought to their family in sports. “He is one of the biggest inspirations in my life because I’m the prime example or standard of what he inspires to be.” Because of this factor, Ogbonnanze felt he needed to be an athlete. It fueled his need to play football, his yearning to join the track team, and his success in both sports. Keeping football under his belt in college allowed him to keep being an inspiration. But he missed the added opportunities that track and field gave him, in the sense of being an inspiration and setting personal and recognized records. But before Ogbonnanze would know it, the opportunity to bring it all back struck.
On March 8, 2024, Western New England University announced that they were adding track and field to its roster of varsity sports. The team was set to start competing in the 2024-25 spring sports season, and sign-ups opened soon after the announcement to gauge interest. Ogbonnanze was one of the first people to jump on that chance.
“As soon as I heard the announcement, I was reaching out to the coach, seeing when their meetings were, asking what I could do to help, trying to recruit some of the football guys, everything I could possibly do to make sure this program ran,” said Ogbonnanze. Until the season began, Ogbonnanze focused on returning to the track mindset. He wanted to be prepared to do his best when this first season started.
By the time the season came around, the team was stacked with many former track athletes and many freshmen coming off their senior track season from high school. The sport did have some difficulty grabbing former track athletes into their program, as so many of them had spent their years in college without the sport and were out of practice. But the organization pushed its advertising and succeeded in creating an all-star team, with Ogbonnanze up near the top. “It’s just a matter of former track athletes getting back into it if they have the time and then the new guys coming in, getting used to the new speed of a collegiate sport, and then from there recruiting even more,” Ogbonnanze explained.
Now, getting into the season, the team has been to a couple of track meets so far. One such meet was the Snowflake Classic, hosted by Tufts University, where Ogbonnanze earned a winning mark of 39.66m in the Discus event, which won the event by .05m and a mark of 13.46m in the Shot Put event, earning second place in the Snowflake Classic and qualified Ogbonnanze for the New England DIII Championships in May. Ogbonnanze’s two performances led the Golden Bears to a fifth-place finish at the Snowflake Classic.
Between meets, the team practices quite often, preparing for their next competition at Minnechaug Regional High School. “Going there gives throwers an actual circle to train in rather than throw in the back of Western New England University’s gym, and gives the runners an actual track to run around as they would in competition.” So there, Ogbonnanze stands in the throwing ring of Minnechaug Regional High School. He gets in the position to throw and tosses the shotput, preparing for his next meet, the next goal he’ll achieve, the next record he’ll break, and preparing to continue inspiring all who know him with his feats.
