Posted on April 24, 2008
Tanique Carter took the winding road to JMU. But the junior sprinter already holds women’s track records in the 100 meters and 200 meters, and was part of the 400-meter relay that set another school record at the CAA Championships last weekend.
Things are starting to settle down.
Carter is in her first season competing for James Madison, after she ran unattached last year because Radford wouldn’t grant her a release from her scholarship. Madison sprints, hurdles and jumps coach Bill Walton says he’s handled the situation delicately.
“I didn’t really talk about changing a lot of things,” Walton said. “I became her third coach in three years, and that’s a pretty rough adjustment to go through. So most of last year was just spent getting to know one another and developing a training base to work from for this year.”
Carter wasn’t a member of the track team in her first year attending JMU. As a sophomore, she had to drive herself to meets she wanted to compete in and pay her own entry fee. A series of obstacles brought her to this point, beginning with a high school injury that dashed her chances of garnering multiple scholarship offers.
While attending Hermitage High School in Richmond, Carter tore the anterior cruciate ligament of her right knee in the fall of her junior year. A casual game of tennis turned catastrophic.
“It was just one of my teammates on the tennis team,” Carter said. “We were just playing for fun, but it got competitive — a little too competitive.”
She scheduled surgery for Spring Break and was forced to miss outdoor track season, losing her opportunity to impress college coaches looking for recruits. It took her until indoor track her senior year to make a return, after she rehabilitated at Healthsouth Medical Clinic in Richmond three times a week for about five months.
Even when she started competing again, Carter’s outlook was discouraging. Her times were slower, her chances to run at the next level dwindling.
“Her times were way below what she was running before,” said Terry Brandon, Carter’s mother, in a phone interview Wednesday. “She felt like she wasn’t ever going to get back to her normal pace and she missed her opportunity in terms of being recruited, so it was really devastating for her emotionally.”
But Carter was improving her times again near the end of high school. Following the advice of one of her coaches, Carter filled out online questionnaires to various schools making her eligible to receive scholarship offers. Only Radford responded.
While Radford was the only school that offered her a scholarship, Carter had already been accepted to Virginia Tech academically and Brandon encouraged her to go there. She also advised her daughter to apply to JMU, but Carter was focused on getting a scholarship.
It turned out that the scholarship wasn’t worth the trouble. While she continued to recover strength after tearing her ACL, there were issues with Radford’s track program.
“She had some difficulties with the coaches,” Brandon said. “Their style was very different, they used a lot of profanity; [there] was just a lot of tension among the team members.”
But Carter respected her coaches — especially the sprints, hurdles and jumps coach Bruce Berry.
“They were really good coaches,” she says. “But sometimes at meets they would get angry if you didn’t perform well and we would have team meetings where they would just yell…and yell.
“I had instances where we would butt heads, and at a point it got pretty bad. Toward the end it had gotten a lot better.”
At one point, Berry was considering coaching elsewhere and talked with Carter and three of her freshman teammates about it. He wanted them to follow his lead.
But that fell through, and eventually the situation got to a point where Carter figured she would be better off at another school.
She came up with a plan she presented to a judicial review board petitioning for a release from her scholarship, emphasizing that just as Berry would have been allowed to leave the program after the season, she should be granted a release from her scholarship to transfer. She was denied under the rationale that Radford would be competing against JMU.
They would have granted her a release, her coaches said, if she was transferring out of state. But Carter was skeptical of that explanation.
“I think that it was a little bit of animosity,” Carter said, softening her voice. “They wanted to prevent me from running because I was leaving.”
According to Brandon, there was constant controversy within the team and among the coaches. Carter’s roommate Ally Romanow was also on the team, and she too left Radford at the end of the year. She didn’t get along with the distance running coach and wanted to get closer to her hometown of Sterling, so she transferred to George Mason. But Romanow wasn’t on a scholarship, so she didn’t have to deal with the stress of arguing for a release.
Nobody from the coaching staff that Tanique dealt with at Radford is still there.
When Carter transferred to JMU she found it easier to get involved on campus. Organizations had a stronger presence, she said, and the track team doesn’t typically travel as far as Radford, which competes in the Big South Conference.
She was able to get involved in school organizations and still acclimate herself to the coaching staff at JMU. She participates actively in the NAACP, Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, and Sigma Alpha Lambda, a national leadership and honors organization.
Now Carter is preparing for the NCAA East Region Championships, where she has qualified for the 100- and 200-meter events. Whatever she does in that meet, she’ll be back next year for possibly her last season.
But Carter gained a year of eligibility by sitting out last year; she could go to graduate school and compete at JMU after she gets her psychology degree.
