When I was in high school in Tennessee, I came north to visit Amherst College. Among the campus buildings that caught my attention was the Coolidge Cage. I had never seen such a thing before: a square floor plan, four-sided pyramidal roof, and space not only for basketball but for sports I associated with the outdoors, including tennis, baseball and especially track.

Three years later, as a college freshman, I discovered that the Amherst cage was not unique. UMass had a practically identical building, as did Wesleyan, Trinity, and other New England campuses. Furthermore, while these cages were convenient for wintertime infield and pitchers’ practice, they were used for actual competition in the world of indoor track.

This, mind you, was the old world, the world not of a modern 200-meter oval but of a four-sided race course hugging all four walls, 10 laps to the mile, each corner banked to make it easier to turn left every 44 yards – nobody was thinking metric.

We practiced the turns: approach on the high side, lean left, use the downward slope of the banking to accelerate out of the corner and into the straightaway. The Coolidge Cage surface was packed dirt; in Curry Hicks Cage at UMass it was wooden boards, similarly banked but faster, since wood flexes and dirt doesn’t. Meets were mostly dual events or else comprised multiple heats, since these tracks could barely accommodate four lanes.

Later, Amherst and UMass upgraded these tracks with cork or rubberized surfaces. UMass retained the banked corners. Amherst flattened theirs, and that track is no longer used for running laps, only for sprint starts, hurdles and baton-passing practice.

Meanwhile, in one of its many steps in promoting sports for women, Smith College built a modern 200-meter oval indoor track, an outstanding facility for the college’s runners, jumpers and throwers. It has twice hosted the NCAA Division III Indoor National Championships, and it provides a venue for excellent high school competition.

If you’ve been to any of the school meets here, you know the excitement can be as intense as it is for high school basketball. Cheers bounce off the walls, sweat glistens, clocks flash numbers, teammates clap hands and push each other to be faster, higher, stronger.

The noise and the thrills would have been especially high at Smith on Sunday, though the final Pioneer Valley Interscholastic Athletic Conference track-and-field meet of the season, the Western Mass. championship, was ultimately canceled due to the impending snowstorm. Among the runners to watch would have been Amherst senior Moriah Luetjen. A favorite in the 600 meters despite having missed two months of the season, she was hoping to run a fast enough time to qualify for the elite heat at that distance at the state Division III meet on Valentine’s Day at the Reggie Lewis Center in Boston. Next fall she expects to be running at Columbia. Another outstanding Amherst runner is Brooke Nedeau, who last week lowered her two-mile time from 12:10 to a new personal best of 11:42.

Two to watch from Northampton in the middle or longer distances were the O’Neil sisters, Maeve and Mairead. Maeve’s 5:11.75 from 2024 is the second-fastest Northampton girls’ time mile ever. (Mary Yount ran 5:09.74 in 2019.)

For most spectators, the ultimate excitement is in the relays, with the 4x400-meter relay typically the last event of the day. On the same track a week ago, the Amherst girls’ team won that event by an enormous margin, with Luetjen running anchor, taking the baton handoff from her twin sister, Emelia.

For a look at the bigtime version of the sport, watch the Millrose Games this afternoon. Held at the New York Armory, this is the biggest indoor track event in the United States, bringing together Olympians, NCAA champions, world champions, and rising newcomers. Coverage on NBC starts at 4 p.m. Viewers will miss seeing most of the high school races – they’re earlier in the day – but the broadcast includes the Nike High School Girls’ Invitational Mile, the Alliance Bernstein High School Girls’ Invitational 4x400 relay, and the Mondo High School Boys’ Invitational 4x200.

Corporate sponsorship is ubiquitous – Nike, Toyota, KPMG – but the biggest corporate name at the Millrose is Wanamaker, the grand old Philadelphia department store. The day’s finale is the Wanamaker Mile, always the highlight of the meet. The women’s mile starts at 5:40 p.m., the men’s following immediately.

John Stifler has taught writing and economics at UMass and has written extensively for running magazines and newspapers. He can be reached at jstifler@umass.edu