In Rockland, a successful college track team with no track is finally about to get one

SPARKILL — Ray Kondracki stood in front of a flat, unadorned expanse of lawn on a recent day, a look of anticipation on his face.

“If they build it, they will come,” he said.

He didn’t mean the people who once lived and worked in the boys home/orphanage that twice stood on the site.

Twice because the original burned down in 1907 and a replacement burned and was rebuilt in the 1950 before the facility was finally closed and demolished in the 1970s.

Now the site, which is owned by the Dominican Sisters of Sparkill and sits in front of their convent, will be turned into a 200-meter track for a college track team that has never had its own track.

The sisters are leasing the land for an unspecified, but reportedly very small, amount to St. Thomas Aquinas College, the school the order founded more than 70 years ago on adjacent property.

For about two decades, St. Thomas Aquinas College (known locally simply as STAC) has fielded winter indoor and spring outdoor track teams.

Despite the lack of a track, the team has often excelled at the Division II level with individual and team conference championships and multiple national championship individual qualifiers.

Kondracki, a 1975 Tappan Zee High and 1981 STAC grad, is the current men’s and women’s head track and field coach.

He arrived after the 2019 spring season as a just-retired Clarkstown South high school teacher and coach, along with his son, Kyle, about to start his senior year on STAC’s team.

Kondracki, of course, knew about the lack of a track. But he also arrived to find there were no throwing implements (shots, discuses, hammers) and no real throwing area. Now, his throwers use throwing circles he painted and constructed.

Winning in track despite one big hurdle

Led by those throwers, Kondracki's men’s track team recently finished second in the East Coast Conference championships.

Manny Mena-Jimenez, who graduated 20 minutes to the north from North Rockland High and was the ECC's 2023 men's track and field athlete of the year, repeated as ECC hammer and discus champion and also became shot put champion. He has also qualified to compete in his second NCAA Division II outdoor championship, which are next week.

While none made nationals, STAC’s jumpers and runners also had a strong spring. At the ECCs, STAC took first in the triple jump and third in the long jump, despite having no jumping pits on campus. STAC jumpers train in part by jumping up onto high jump mats.

And on the track, STAC won gold in the 4x100 relay and bronze in three other events.

All this begs the question: What would have happened had the college had a track facility?

Most of STAC’s runners train, under Kondracki’s direction, hither and yon  – running sometimes on a local rail trail, or on an old-school, cinder former high school track about a mile from the Sparkill campus. Or, when possible, on area high schools’ current-day tracks.

There are even track lines painted around the Kondracki-created makeshift throwing area, meaning sometimes hammers and discuses are flying while other members of the team run just outside the throwing and landing areas.

The issue at STAC has always been one of land. There simply isn’t enough available to build a typical outdoor 400-meter track.

But 200 meters will slot in nicely on the nuns’ property. The project awaits anticipated local municipal approval and Kondracki appears optimistic that there will be a track by next spring “with high jump, long jump, pole vault – all of the amenities.”

“We’re going to love it,” he said.

Why now? The answer may be a combination of the team’s success and maybe some lobbying from the school.

But Kondracki prefers to just say, “The Dominican Sisters are very good to us. They’re very, very good to us – extremely good to us. … The sisters are blessed and are blessing us.”

Kondracki’s hope is that blessing will spark many more track and field athletes (the “they” in the “they will come” ) to join his program, which, this spring, included more than 50 male and female athletes.

His vision extends to STAC eventually hosting meets with athletes simply doing more loops of the track for races longer than 200 meters, just as occurs in indoor track.

Why athletes come with no track facility

Even without a track, and with no full track and field scholarships offered at this time (although the school reportedly provides some financial assistance to 85% of the student body), STAC already attracts track athletes from outside its immediate surroundings.

About 50% are from Rockland County, but some of the remaining 50% are from far, far outside, with Kondracki acknowledging New York City’s relative close proximity is often a good part of the draw.

STAC’s 2024 track athletes included people from as far away as Florida and California.

But that’s relatively close compared to some. Kondracki has already signed a decathlete for next year who hails from Spain and was just at a community college in Ohio.

And more may be coming. He noted he has held more than 60 Zoom calls with international athletes.

Past track and field athletes, recruited by Kondracki’s predecessor, Lorne Marcus, who left for another school in 2019, came from, among other places, New Zealand, Australia, Guam and Germany.

“He built the foundation we’re standing on,” Kondracki said of Marcus, who shared what Kondracki indicated was his student-first vision.

Although the school’s track athletes sometimes compete against D-I athletes, STAC, in more ways than just a lack of a track, is far removed from being that type of program.

“In D-I, they kind of own you,” Kondracki said, referring to athletes. “We’re interested in the whole package – the student/athlete. … It’s about the kids getting an education.“

The student part is a focus for Kondracki, who replaced Marcus upon retiring as an earth science and special ed teacher at Clarkstown South, a school where he’d worked since 1985 and where he’d led its track teams to 11 Section 1 championship titles and was named Rockland track and field coach of the year 11 times.

He joined a program that, under Marcus, had won conference outdoor titles in  2013, ’17, ’18 and ’19, as well as an indoor conference title in 2018.

Kondracki, who ran on what amounted to a STAC road-race club team for a couple of years as a student there, has added to that with an outdoor 2022 ECC men’s win.

A bonded team

Kondracki, who also teaches coaching methodology at STAC, has done that in part by forging a close bond with his athletes and being a little bit of everything from quasi admissions officer to groundskeeper and handyman.

In that latter role, he created the odd but legitimate throwing area. His throwers now use a parking lot and adjacent field, throwing from regulation-size circles Kondracki painted in the parking lot with actual portable wooden toe boards he constructed for shot at the top of some.

The carpentry skills were probably inherited from his late dad, Stan, but the creativity that extends to deciding where practices will be held on any given day, he indicated, comes from years of being a high school coach forced to think outside the box when snow flies and training outside isn’t happening.

All of this is part of Kondracki’s desire to “create opportunities” – a desire, he says, that runs from the top down at the college and which students appreciate.

Kondracki laughs when noting how Mena-Jimenez, whom he calls a “chicken wing connoisseur” from their travels to nationals and other meets, doesn’t hesitate to text him at 11 p.m., saying, “We need this. We need this. … “

Referring to the criminal justice major minoring in psychology, Kondracki quipped, “That’s how he learned how to manipulate me.”

He noted when Mena-Jimenez went to athletic director Nicole Ryan last year to ask her to okay the purchase of an added discus, she used a little psychology/blackmail of her own, telling him she’d think about it if he qualified for the national championships.

He did and she bought it, Kondracki recalled.

“He like owns the place,” Kondracki joked of Mena-Jimenez.

Mena-Jimenez, a 2023 second-team D-II All-American, could easily throw for bigger schools – schools with more traditional track facilities. But he’s happy.

“STAC is so small you get to know everybody,” he said.

Fellow thrower and senior Tyler Robinson, who threw for Kondracki at Clarkstown South, looks past what STAC doesn’t have to what it provides.

He said its has provided him with a chance to compete he might not have gotten elsewhere.  He had weighed going to Division I Monmouth and D-I Syracuse but became sold on STAC after Kondracki reached out to him.

“ I bought into the plan (Kondracki) had. I bought into the success he had here,” Robinson said.

When he arrived, he was Kondracki’s only thrower. This season, he said, there were eight male and four female throwers.

“Here, there’s an opportunity,” he said. “At a big facility, you come in with a lot of people. Here I feel I can make a difference on the team. … I feel like it’s a community here.”

Fellow thrower Chris Cajamarca, who graduated from Pearl River High last year, had received a letter of interest from Bucknell and had also thought about trying to walk on to Manhattan College’s team, but didn’t know if he was good enough to make that squad.

Going to STAC became an easy decision.

“It’s closer to home and I get to throw,” he said, noting his goals don’t center on distances, but “kind of more about that inner feeling and satisfaction of going to a competition and throwing my best and feeling that sense of achievement that I earned my PRs (personal records) after all those hours of practice.”

The lack of a track has never really bothered Cajamarca, who says, ” I think, for starters, not having a track, it really brings out your inner motivation. It’s really about the love for the game. You make yourself go out wherever – a parking lot.”

But that doesn’t mean he isn’t looking forward to throwing at a more traditional facility.

Cajamarca, Robinson and Mena-Jimenez will all be back next year and hope the planned track is a reality by next spring.

“Having the track makes it feel like we can train like those other guys (on other teams). We will have like no excuses (and) it can bring motivation to the team,” Cajamarca said.

“A lot of kids are excited,” he said.

And so is one coach.

“I see us going even farther than right now, competing on an even higher level,” Kondracki said.

And he plans to be around to try to make that happen for a very long time.

Pointing to the support his program and his athletes receive from the school that he says, always has “the kids in mind,” he said, “It makes me never want to leave. I’ll be here as long as they’ll have me.”

Nancy Haggerty covers cross-country, track & field, field hockey, skiing, ice hockey, basketball, girls lacrosse and other sporting events for The Journal News/lohud. Follow her on Twitter at @HaggertyNancy .

This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: In Rockland, a successful college track team with no track is finally about to get one