Ryan Qin, a senior at Lexington High School, is one of about 200 indoor track athletes who crowd into LHS’s field house after school in the winter for practice.
Track and field and cross country are no-cut teams, meaning anyone who signs up can participate — and hundreds of students do.
To kick off indoor track practice, all 200 athletes warm up by jogging two laps around the field house’s 146 meter track.
Sometimes, the boys and girls junior-varsity basketball teams crowd inside the field house for their practices, too, which take place on the infield of the small track. And often, the wrestling team joins in to practice behind the bleachers.
“I can’t stress how chaotic it is,” Qin told the Observer.
On top of crowding, the track is unsafe for runners, Halston Taylor, an assistant cross country and track coach at LHS, told the Observer. The size and shape of the track lends itself to athletes getting stress fractures. Because of that safety issue, most runners on the winter track team, Qin included, don’t even use the field house’s track most of the time.
“If there’s no snow, we’re on the outdoor track, just because it’s safer,” Taylor said. “It’s borrowed time until someone gets hurt pretty badly in there and [Lexington is] going to be opened up to a liability lawsuit…we’ve told [the town] this is very dangerous yet no one does anything about it.”
The current field house has a 146 meter four-lane D-shaped indoor track with slight banks on its curves. There are sharp turns around which runners have to slow down to safely maneuver because of its shape.
“The centripetal force is trying to push you out, you’re trying to pull yourself in, and with those sharp turns, there’s almost no straight,” Taylor explained. Centripetal force is the ‘center-seeking’ force that pulls an object inward, compelling it to move in a circular path instead of a straight line. This plays a role in track when runners turn corners. They lean inward, which puts stress on their inside legs, to run around a corner. Doing that repeatedly can lead to injury — the smaller a track is, the more corners runners have to turn.
“You’re just killing your legs and you’re going to develop stress fractures from doing that,” Taylor explained.
In tandem with the new high school building, the town is planning to renovate and add to the field house, which could cost about $19 million, Mike Burton, who is a partner at Dore and Whittier, the construction company on the project, said during a Sept. 18 community meeting. The track in the new structure will be the same length, however. And it will have one fewer lane.
The School Building Committee decided it preferred the 146 meter three-lane track during its Feb. 24 meeting.
One of the biggest roadblocks driving the SBC away from pursuing a design with a longer track was cost. The cost estimate for a design with a 200 meter track, which LHS’s track coaches prefer, was closer to around $55 million.
The other barrier to the larger track was the Massachusetts School Building Authority, or MSBA, a state program the town is working with to finance the high school project. According to the most recent cost estimate, the MSBA is poised to grant Lexington about $110 million to build its new high school.
The MSBA won’t allow Lexington to include a new field house as a part of its high school building project, but it will let the town add to and renovate the current structure. The design with the 200 meter track involved saving less of the original field house, which Burton said concerned him during that February meeting. He worried that design would not “pass the sniff test to say that it’s truly an add-reno.”
But in high school sports, a 146 meter track just won’t do.
A regulation indoor track is 200 meters long, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations, whose rules are followed by the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association, or MIAA. All Massachusetts public schools’ sports teams abide by the MIAA’s rules. Because Lexington’s field house is not regulation length, the indoor track team has to travel for track events.
“Right now, with the high school situation, almost everything is run at either Reggie Lewis, Boston University, or primarily the New Balance Track,” Taylor said. “But [we’re] paying a hefty fee to do that.”
The small field house affects more than just runners — there isn’t enough room for the field athletes to fully practice their events. The athletes who compete in the long jump, for example, practice a shortened version of their sprint takeoff and then jump and land onto mats, not sand.
“You can’t do anything completely, you have to do portions of it, make sacrifices,” Taylor said.
Taylor explained those flaws and safety issues to the SBC in a letter he sent in August 2024. He also offered to help plan and design the new field house.
Before he became a track coach at LHS, Taylor was the director and head coach of men’s and women’s cross country and track and field at MIT. He coached there for 40 years. During his tenure, MIT built new indoor and outdoor tracks. University officials tapped Taylor for his expertise as a track coach to guide architects on what the athletes need.
Taylor would do the same for Lexington, he told the Observer. But he hasn’t gotten a response to his 2024 letter to the SBC yet.
“We have paid professionals on our staff who have the expertise in what should go into the design of this field house, whatever size it ends up being,” Town Meeting member Dawn McKenna told the Observer. “If they are not being consulted through every step of this critical phase of the project…I am concerned we will waste millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money while creating a space that is not safe for our kids.”
The track coaches haven’t been completely left out of the design process, however.
The three head coaches, Rebecca Trachsel, James Hall, and Steve McKenna (who is also Dawn McKenna’s son) were invited to a virtual meeting with SMMA to discuss the design options for the new field house.
“This meeting included all field house users, who had an opportunity to share what would be ideal for meeting their programmatic needs,” Lexington Public Schools Superintendent Julie Hackett told the Observer. “Our track and field coaches are valued school community members, and we appreciate their dedication and contributions.”
Steve, who is the head coach of LHS’s boys cross country team and assistant coach for the indoor and outdoor track and field teams, is not satisfied with how that meeting went. The group did not discuss the safety of the proposed layouts during that meeting, he told the Observer.
“There was no conversation about how various length tracks, number of lanes, or turn radii would impact the track team’s ability to practice safely,” he recalled.
Track coaches have also met with the town’s Capital Expenditures Committee, Charles Lamb, a liaison between the CEC and the SBC, told the Observer.
Nonetheless, the town chose to build the same length track, but with one fewer lane.
“Projects of this magnitude require tradeoffs,” Hackett said. “While giving every department and program everything they want is impossible, all ideas are thoughtfully considered, and all voices are respected and heard.”
This tradeoff means the track athletes, once again, won’t have a suitable indoor track. If the town builds the field house and indoor track as it is designed, the runners won’t use it, Taylor said.
But there may be an opportunity for the SBC to go a different route.
The SBC has been having “value engineering” discussions with the teams designing and building the new school over the past few months. Those discussions involve further evaluating different aspects of the project to see if there are more cost-effective ways to get the same result. During a value engineering conversation about the field house on Aug. 11, Joe Pato, an SBC and Select Board member, suggested the town do a “minimal renovation” now “to keep the field house functional for a short period of time” and do a larger renovation later.
“The advocates for the field house have all come to us and said, ‘we really wanted a big field house’, right? And that’s not what this is doing,” Pato said during that meeting.
The SBC will return to that conversation, but Pato is unsure when.
Regardless, Taylor “would love” to work with SMMA to design a field house that the hundreds of runners on the track teams could use, he said.
A larger track would certainly be nice for our wonderful high school athletes. However, have the proponents of such a request, thought enough about abutters and neighbors? The added cost is of great concern but my focus is on how such a facility would be used and financed. If a larger track also means adding basketball courts, wrestling space and other sport spaces, we are potentially talking about this space being used by more than just LHS students. A larger sports facility will likely attract out of town sports teams and after-school clubs such as AAU. If in order to build a larger track, financing options include renting the space out, thousands of families and athletes will be descending upon Lexington High School on weeknights, every weekend and summer vacations. The traffic and congestion alone will completely change the quiet, peaceful atmosphere of the neighborhood. A neighborhood, by the way, that is already dealing with a lot of traffic and parking problems during school hours. Parking lots will be filled by out of towners, preventing our own town residents from enjoying the town fields on weeknights and weekends. If athletes and families are interested in a larger track and sports facility they can look at the Edge in Bedford or scope out another space in the outskirts of town or another location. Lest we forget the beautiful outdoor track next to the high school. The LHS swim team, ski team and likely other sports teams travel to other locations for practice and events and the track team can do the same if there is a need for a larger indoor facility than the one proposed. I am aware that track attracts the largest number of student participants at LHS but feel the long-term, day-to-day cost of a larger track should not fall on neighbors and residents.
I very much appreciate the Observer’s reporting on the new LHS project, but this article was missing a couple of important points for context. While it is true that a regulation indoor track is 200 meters, and that all MIAA sports teams have to abide by those rules, which means that the indoor track team has to travel for track events, what the article fails to mention is that there are NO public schools in MA that have 200 meter tracks, and NO schools in the Middlesex league host track meets. The Middlesex League, as well as most other leagues in Eastern MA, run all track meets at Reggie Lewis, New Balance, Harvard, or BU. (note that some schools in central and western MA might have meets at sub-200 meter tracks just because of the distance to those larger tracks.) This is important context, because the article implies that by not having a 200 meter track, LHS will be somehow deficient; this is clearly not the case. I think that the SBC has had to balance so many competing demands in making decisions about this project, but one of the foremost ones is cost; to my mind, adding tens of millions of extra dollars to an already expensive project in order to provide Lexington with a track that is better than any other public school in MA would not be a responsible decision.
To add further context to this article, many people are not fully understanding the difference between what a field house with a 200m track vs one with a 146m track means for the track & field team. This is not an issue of having a place to compete. New Balance and other facilities serve that need. The issue is about safely navigating practice for a program that has grown nearly 33% since 2015.
For reference, the LHS football team has fewer than 60 boys. The track & field team has nearly 220 boys and girls. The football team practices on the 57k sq ft Dr. Harold Crumb Football Field. The track & field team practices in the 34k sq ft field house. Now this is not an argument for track & field over football, both teams need safe space for kids to practice. But, the fact remains that for as many as 90 days during the winter, and many more during bad weather days in the spring, sprinters, jumpers, pole vaulters, hurdles, throwers, and middle and long distances runners cram into this space and hope no one gets hurt. Now the SBC is planning to build a bigger field house that would actually reduce the available space for the track & field team by 25%. How does that make sense?
If we need 57k sq ft to safely let 60 football players run full speed and hit each other, then why are we okay with less than 34k sq ft for 220 track & field athletes to go full speed and hopefully NOT hit each other?
Mr. McKenna, perhaps the number of track team participants needs to be limited. Perhaps not every student who wants to join track, can join. Hundreds of students try out for the LHS soccer teams each year and don’t make the cut. Sadly, that is one of the disadvantages of having such a large school: not everyone can make the team. Thats why families sign up their kids for clubs, an expensive and time consuming alternative but one that athletes in basketball, soccer and other sports must resort to. Town residents and LHS neighbors needn’t be overly burdened so every student can make the team. Another option is to offer a track club that meets on the outdoor track for a more casual team experience.