Winged Avenger

COURTNEY STEWART/Daily Bruin Senior sprinter Michael
Lipscomb is a leader for young UCLA sprinters and a
possible future coach.

By J.P. Hoornstra Daily Bruin Senior Staff
[email protected]

An hour after sprint practice is over, Michael Lipscomb is still
at work. He’s not sprinting anymore, not stretching, not
doing any barefoot high-hops, but he’s still trying to make
his team better. He’s standing in the middle of the Acosta
Center training room, instilling lessons of leadership in freshman
sprinter Jonathan Williams. If Lipscomb had a wing, Williams would
be under it.

But maybe Lipscomb does have wings.

This year, he became the first male athlete in six years to
represent UCLA at the NCAA finals in the 200-meter dash. His
season-best time of 20.64 is the 15th-lowest time in the field.

In addition to being the best sprinter UCLA has seen in years,
Lipscomb, the lone senior, is the unquestioned leader on the
track.

“I’m a great role model on this team,” he said
with abandon. “Not because I talk a lot, but it’s about
what I put on the track.

“I speak more in 20 seconds of running my 200 than I can
for about an hour of speaking.”

Case in point: May 1, 2001, UCLA at USC, the 69th annual dual
meet.

UCLA had won the previous 22 meets dating back to 1978.
Lipscomb, in his first year as a Bruin, was scheduled to run the
4×100-meter relay, a critical event “not in the sense that
the points are critical, but it sets the tempo, the feeling, the
vibe of the meet,” as he describes.

Whatever positive vibes UCLA was riding from its win streak were
at least dampened when Lipscomb dropped the baton on his leg of the
race. USC went on to win the 4×100 easily and the meet by a score
of 82-81, thereby ending the streak.

On paper, it takes 19 events to determine the outcome of a dual
meet. Lipscomb sees it differently.

“I feel responsible for losing that meet,” he said.
“By me dropping that baton on USC’s track and letting
them high-step it to the finish line, it gave them a sense of
superiority and us a sense of inferiority.”

One year later, UCLA hosted the dual meet and was looking to
start a new streak. Lipscomb was again scheduled to touch the baton
second in the 4×400 relay. But with last year’s outcome still
in the back of his mind, he ate up responsibility for everyone
wearing a blue jersey.

“I stepped up and said, “˜No, I’m anchoring the
4×4 because I want to make sure that I get the baton if we’re
even 30 meters behind, because I guarantee that I’m gonna
walk across the finish line first’, which I did.”

The Bruins won the 4×400 by almost a full second and won the
meet by a relatively huge 40-point margin, with Lipscomb winning
both the 100- (10.41) and 200-meter (20.50, wind-aided) dashes.

Days after his training-room exchange with Williams, Lipscomb
was sitting on the track with the man who bequeathed him the title
of team leader, Bryan Harrison. Harrison was Lipscomb’s
teammate, and UCLA’s leading sprinter (10.45 in the
100-meter), in 2000-01.

“I think this guy’s one of the top five 200
sprinters in the country,” Harrison said of Lipscomb, who sat
within earshot, gazing confidently over the track.

“(In five years, he can be) wherever he wants to be. It
depends on whether he takes the academic route or the athletic
route.”

An easy choice?

Lipscomb graduated from South Hills High in West Covina, and was
accepted to USC on academic merit with a major in bioengineering.
When his financial aid package fell through, Lipscomb enrolled with
some friends in Mt. San Antonio College, a community college in
Glendale.

“And it’s a good thing because I probably never
would’ve stepped on USC’s track, and never ran track
and field again,” he said.

Running track for the high school team was just an afterthought,
something fun to do with friends when he wasn’t studying. It
was still far enough in the back of his mind when he entered Mt.
SAC that he didn’t even run track his first year,
concentrating instead on his studies in biology.

But the next year, at the urging of coaches at Mt. SAC, Lipscomb
tried his hand at the decathlon, but did “really
poorly,” he said. “Then I went back to sprinting, and I
blew up there. I did so well that it reinvigorated my love for
track and field.”

He did well enough to catch the attention of John Smith, the
UCLA sprinters coach at the time.

“After talking to Smith, I became a track fan
again,” Lipscomb said.

A fan, but not a die-hard sprinter. With academics still the
priority, Lipscomb was accepted as a transfer to UC San Diego, UC
Irvine and UCLA after two years at Mt. SAC. With a 3.8 transfer GPA
and a 21-second personal best in the 200-meter, he won the praises
of Smith and men’s head coach Art Venegas. Derek Loudenback,
the current sprinters coach, couldn’t be more pleased with
what he’s inherited.

“When he first came here he was more focused on academics;
he’s still coming to a realization that he’s very good
at track,” Loudenback said.

“He’s pretty much invaluable this year. He’s
meant a lot to the sprint team and the team in general.”

But two years later, with two individual Pac-10 titles under his
belt, and his first race at the NCAA outdoors on the horizon,
Lipscomb still has one foot strongly embedded in the academic
world.

“I am as academically-oriented as I am
track-oriented,” he said. “I never wanted to be one of
those “˜dumb jocks.'”

At his current pace, Lipscomb expects to graduate in winter
2003. After that, the sky’s the limit. He’s tossed
around pursuing the biology industry, academic research, a career
in business and law school.

Or?

“He will be an excellent coach,” Loudenback said.
“Knowing what he knows, what works for him, and relating it
to other people, makes him an excellent coach.”

While he didn’t run competitively during his first year at
Mt. SAC, Lipscomb tried his hand at coaching sprinters for a
season. The 18-year-old Lipscomb went back to South Hills High,
getting a taste for cultivating others’ talent in what he
called an “exhilarating” experience.

And Lipscomb admits he’s put more serious thought into
coaching, maybe even at UCLA, as his college career has
blossomed.

But let’s not jump the gun. Lipscomb has at least one more
stop on his track trek today in Baton Rouge before it’s back
to business.

“I’m definitely putting all my focus, all my energy
into national championships,” he said, “And when I come
back I’m probably not going to sleep for about two weeks as I
prepare for 10th week and finals.

“And I’m not going to have any regrets because
I’m going to have a great showing at national
championships.”