Why no college students at college track meets?

collegiate track fan wrote:

What is track missing right now with college students?

Tailgate parties, cheerleaders and/or "hot" guys.

txRUNNERgirl wrote:

collegiate track fan wrote:

What is track missing right now with college students?

Tailgate parties, cheerleaders and/or \"hot\" guys.

You mean girls don\'t fawn over puny pipsqueakes with concave chests?

Ha ha hahaha.

I would go to more but I sort of think that'd make me look like a poseur or a stalker. I'm sure the team have seen me running around and on the track.

Because most meets are held early in the day and college students are still sleeping.....

its because meets have become these long, drawn out, all-day affairs where they run 15 heats of every event and there is no scoring.

in other words the typical meet is boring.

teams need to bring back the duel meet. people will actually come out to watch track if they know they are coming for 2-3 hours and seeing some top level competition in every event and knowing that the placing actually means something

juicy miler wrote:

teams need to bring back the [dual] meet. people will actually come out to watch track if they know they are coming for 2-3 hours and seeing some top level competition in every event and knowing that the placing actually means something

MAN do I agree with this!

How many people would watch basketball if it had

a) ten teams

b) playing each other (round-robin style) for five minutes

c) with no score kept?

Cross country duals/tris are a blast, too, and you see them so rarely at the college level these days.

yeah that is def true I say that about HS and college. The other thing is at least in my experience that all sports in college except fball and basketball dont have any fans at them. If you take out parents girlfriends etc a lot of these sports are just the same as track

They are held way too f***ing early in the morning.

The way to bring fans is to have all the slow heats during the day, and then in the evening you have a compressed schedule of fast heats only, offering fans a couple of hours of high level competition rather than 9 hours of ocassional entertainment mixed in with heat #7 of the 800m, etc. Of course, you also need to get people interested in track; right now, there are so few fans that a fan-friendly format would seem pointless; why not athlete-friendly, one would think, when there are more athletes than fans at these events?

DI school not on team wrote:

I would go to more but I sort of think that'd make me look like a poseur or a stalker. I'm sure the team have seen me running around and on the track.

Wrong, if you like the sport, go watch the team and cheer them on. If the guys know you are a fan, they will love it that you are there.

Go cheer them on and support them.

here we get horrible coverage which yields no interest even though

We r good teams

lack of marketing and understanding of the sport.

sounds like it is, like it was when I ran in college. No fans at the meets, that were not: relatives, boyfriends/girlfriends, coaches, PE majors forced to work the meet and a few people who were wondering what was going on at the stadium on a Tues evening in April.

WRONG wrote:

DI school not on team wrote:

I would go to more but I sort of think that'd make me look like a poseur or a stalker. I'm sure the team have seen me running around and on the track.

Wrong, if you like the sport, go watch the team and cheer them on. If the guys know you are a fan, they will love it that you are there.

Go cheer them on and support them.

Yeah get out there and give 'em some of those all-time classics like:

"Hold that pace!"

"You're doing great, looking good!"

"He's catching you!"

"SPRINT!!!"

Don Draper wrote:

Yeah get out there and give 'em some of those all-time classics like:

"Hold that pace!"

"You're doing great, looking good!"

"He's catching you!"

"SPRINT!!!"

Yeah, my favorites were:

"Arms! Arms!"

Yeah, Coach, I have arms. So do the other guys. You interested in anything in particular?

"Kick! Kick!"

More than once I wanted to stop and say, "Coach, this is my kick right here. I've been doing it for a while. Sorry if it's not up to your standards."

And, of course, the immortal "All the way through!"

"Push it!"

"Faster! Faster!"

I feel like the only fans of the sport (track and feild) actually compete in it. So you don't get a bunch of people like football games.

Ethan Rissel wrote:

I feel like the only fans of the sport (track and feild) actually compete in it. So you don't get a bunch of people like football games.

no, it's worse than that. i know many guys that ran track in high school and even college that quit being fans once they were done with it and don't attend track meets or follow the sport anymore, but go to lots of other sports as a fan. sad. I find that when I run into people from other countries, they know what's going on in the track and field/road racing world much more often than the avg American.

Because they don't allow gambling on college track meets. If they did, it'd be a big ticket.