the killing of collegiate XC

[gh]

I was recently privy to part of an e-mail exchange between a couple of hardcore NCAA XC fans, and this was part of it:

<<I had dinner Friday night after a middle school xc meet with several friends that all love track and xc. Three of them competed collegiately, two of those coach currently, the fourth guy
ran 1:54 for the 800 in high school and hung 'em up after that.

They were raving about Princeton frosh Sam Pons and about how his team beat Stanford at Notre Dame. I hadn't even looked at Notre Dame results yet but had to throw cold
water on the discussion by noting that Stanford MUST have run a B team.
Turns out, of course, that was true.

At least Stanford ran their top guys for their home meet the weekend before,
but Oregon hosted Wisconsin and other decent teams at their Dellinger Invite
and ran B-squads for both men and women.

Nothing new to us. Still, made me once again consider how easy it is for
folks like those I had dinner with to drift away from caring when situations
like this are the rule, not the exception, over and over again.>>

response:

<<Don't get me started. I don't exactly know when this idea of "nothing matters other than Nationals" started, but it seems like it has resulted in large part from the expansion of the NCAA XC field and the subsequent need to score at-large points. Gone are the early season inter-regional meets, cool old meets like Murray Keating, etc. The late "official" season start date (right around Stanford Invite weekend?) also means there are 3-4 weekends where teams don't compete much, or only run the scrubs.>>

[NormZylstra]

Re: the killing of collegiate XC

ADs only understand conference championships and NCAA placing. You don't have a won-loss to trumpet.

[Conor Dary]

Re: the killing of collegiate XC

At the Dellinger meet Oregon only sat 2 runners and one of those was Verzbicas . Tomorrow will be one of the best meets of year in Madison. Then there are the conference meets, such as the Big Ten which all the teams take seriously throw in a few other meets and I would say the death of college cc is hyperbole.

[dl]

Re: the killing of collegiate XC

At the Dellinger meet Oregon only sat 2 runners and one of those was Verzbicas . Tomorrow will be one of the best meets of year in Madison. Then there are the conference meets, such as the Big Ten which all the teams take seriously throw in a few other meets and I would say the death of college cc is hyperbole.

The Wisconsin race is one of the problems, if you ask me. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to be there to watch it, but what's the point of having a race with a huge percentage of teams from the top 20 racing each other 5 weeks before they do it again at Nationals? The importance of that one race causes most teams to race very little for the first half of the season.

Wouldn't the sport be better served if these teams were at a smaller meet against a few conference rivals; something fans of those schools could attend where they could cheer on their teams?

For the Pac-12, for example, I'd love to see a series of three 4-team meets. Heck, there are 6 weekends for racing prior to the Pre-Nats/Wisconsin weekend, so it's not like there isn't time. Even the schools on the quarter system who go to camp and don't start school until late September could fit in one meet the first weekend of the season, and then two after returning from camp.

Coaches could, of course, still just run B teams in these races, but I think it'd be tougher to not field good teams when the meets are scored against your conference opponents.

And if you're good enough to get away with winning while not always running your stars, all the better.

We often complain about the lack of team competition in track & field. Cross country is much more of a team sport than track & field, and always provides that "score" and "win-loss" thing we all love, and yet we still find a way to mess it up...

[26mi235]

Re: the killing of collegiate XC

I seem to address this issue, mostly on LetsRun. Let us think about the track season and take a miler. Between April and June how many hard mile races will that athlete run? They are only going to race every other weekend until the big finales. Now move up to 5000 meters. How many hard races are these guys going to run in a season? They certainly are not racing hard every weekend and not typically every two weeks of hard racing until the end of the season. By the way, during track season at the pro level, how many 5000/10,000s do people race. They average fewer races per week than the cross country teams do.

Now track races are more 'friendly' than cross country races because the tracks are smooth, flat, and the weather is typically nicer. For the men, the racing is 8k and then 10k. In addition, the track season follows XC/indoor, while XC follows the rest/recovery period and then a re-building phase, especially for that that raced well into summer and that includes the biggest stars that people are most interested in.

The team sports need to play games more often because the skill/timing/teamwork aspect is so big and games are really the testing place and the (final) development place both. In cross country, training really has to be done and it typically involves some injuries to a few runners. If you are racing too often and too early and get one of your top five knocked out, suddenly you are replacing a, say 30th placer with a 70th placer and you have tumbled down the placings.

So, the problem is the nature of the sport as a team sport. However, the whole CORE of cross country is that it is a team sport. Ask anyone that has run it, it is not the same as a track meet.

Finally, if you race your top 7 all the time, how do you develop the other people on the team. Running the other athletes gives them an important chance to develop.

/rant off/

[Marlow]

Re: the killing of collegiate XC

Tomorrow will be one of the best meets of year in Madison.

Tomorrow is now today, and I see that the Duck stars WILL be running - nice!

[Marlow]

Re: the killing of collegiate XC

Can you say, 'anti-climactic'?


1 Lawi Lalang FR Arizona 23:10.8
2 Ryan Hill SR North Carolina St. 23:25.9
3 Diego Estrada SR Northern Arizona 23:26.1
4 Donn Cabral SR Princeton 23:30.1
5 Hassan Mead SR Minnesota 23:30.6
6 Chris Derrick SR Stanford 23:32.1
7 Miles Batty SR BYU 23:35.1
8 Jake Riley SR Stanford 23:38.6
9 Luke Puskedra SR Oregon 23:42.8



62 Verzbicas FR Oregon 24:35.4

[26mi235]

Re: the killing of collegiate XC

I think of the course as 'rolling' but several runners described it as hilly compared to other courses that they run. However, with the strong winds that they had today it was so hard at times that you were worn out when you hit the hills and did not recover because of fighting the wind, which was significantly stronger than for the Boston Marathon and a tailwind only for a minority of the course.

It was interesting watching the races go off; in the woman's race there 305 runners on 44 teams with a mere 270 on 39 teams in the men's race.