BY MATT STOUT
In the few short months Robert Liekweg has competed for the UMass-Lowell track and field team, he’s broken a school record, claimed All-New England honors in two events and nearly opened the spring outdoor season with an NCAA Championships-qualifying finish in the decathlon.
He’s done all this, his coach said, and he hasn’t even run his best event yet.
Liekweg, a 2006 Salem High grad, has quickly established himself as one of the River Hawks’ top freshmen with an array of impressive performances.
Despite missing most of fall training with a lingering hamstring injury, the Salem native recovered in time to run to a third-place finish in the 55-meter hurdles at the Northeast-10 championships.
A week later at the New England Championships, he made an even bigger statement by placing fourth in the heptathlon, with a school-record 4,438 points, and seventh in the 55 hurdles, earning him a pair of regional honors. He was the only freshman at the meet to do so.
Though he didn’t compete in either the IC4A Indoor Championships or the NCAA Championships in the following weeks, Liekweg continued his rise into the start of the outdoor season with a second-place finish in the decathlon at the 49er Classic in Charlotte, N.C., on March 17.
Buoyed by first-place finishes in the 100-meter and 400-meter dash, he compiled 5,221 points, enough to also earn him Northeast-10 Freshman of the Week honors for the second time this year.
Yet, Liekweg, always the goal-setter, has even bigger targets in mind. At the 49er Classic, he was on pace to break the 12-year-old school record of 6,551 points and provisionally qualify for the NCAA Championships in
May with at least 6,350. But sub-50 degree weather and rain hindered him, especially in his top event, the 400-meter hurdles.
“I still think we’re just scratching the surface of what he can achieve,” said Lowell coach Gary Gardner, who counts Liekweg and NE-10 Freshman of the Year Donte Brown as the team’s top rookies. “I think eventually his best event is going to be the 400-meter hurdles, which he hasn’t even run yet. Really, at a national level and as an All-American and so forth, that’s where his future is going to be.”
Still just a freshman, Liekweg understands that future still may be at least another season or two away, but thus far he’s done everything he can to reach it.
Buying into the team’s weight-training program from the start, Liekweg said he’s gained nearly 10 pounds of muscle since ending his high school career as the state’s decathlon champion. Lifting five times a week between working at the school’s rec center and studying for his health degree, Liekweg said his biggest improvements have been in his strength and endurance.
The technical focus, Gardner said, will come later, but the coach said he could see huge jumps in Liekweg early on. Running earlier this season in an open 400-meter race, he finished in 49.27 seconds, a vast improvement from the 51.5 he ran at least year’s high school decathlon.
It’s impressive, considering the former Blue Devil can be stretched pretty thin, sometimes training for several events in practice.
“I show up to practice a couple hours early to get all my lifting and everything done, and then I have running workouts, jumps, throws – I have to do everything,” Liekweg said. “Even in high school, the only things I had to practice (extra for) were the throws or the pole vault, which I did like a week before the decathlon. But I can’t wing it anymore.”
Liekweg’s competitiveness – perhaps his greatest attribute, Gardner said – won’t let him, especially as he continues a friendly intra-team competition with Brown, another standout hurdler.
“We raced each other last year (at the New England Championships), so we’ve kind of been rivals since, and we push each other like that,” said Brown, a Raynham, Mass., native. “We’re really good friends now, so it’s like, ‘I’m going to beat you.’ ‘No, I’m going to beat you.’ It’s all in good fun, we’re still good friends. If one of us has a good day, it’s, ‘Good job.’”