dixout -4- harambe wrote:
Forget about academics or school location or scholarship money or anything like that.
I'm talking to top-tier DIII runners (always made your conference XC roster, always won/scored at conference track, etc.), do you wish you had had enough ability to have gone DI?
Instead of being a big fish in a little pond, you'd have been a negligible fish in a big pond. Knowing how your career played out, do you wish you had gone to a DI school, where you would have possibly been competing with a jersey, participating in races, and not much more?
I agree with an above poster, your premise is wrong, regardless of "forgetting about academics." I was a D3 All-American late in my career, and would have been in all but maybe 4-5 D1 teams' scoring 7s that year (8:15 3k, 4:05 mile). Here's the thing though, would I have reached the level that I got to as a senior if I would have gone D1? Probably not. D1 coaches tend to be less forgiving, and although I was a solid recruit in HS, I would have been just another frosh on most solid D1 squads. I probably would have dropped the sport after a few seasons of being on the practice squad and not racing. I knew so many talented runners that did this at my state's flagship university.
A couple points that I don't think have been addressed: after you graduate, no one really cares what you did in college, or where you ran at. For instance, the average Joe might be impressed that you ran for a Clemson, Auburn, or Alabama, because those are well-known athletic schools, but in running they suck. If I would have been a varsity runner at Northern Arizona or Portland, most people in the "real world" wouldn't really know what that means. To them, college running is college running, it's not football. So in a sense, its not different from D3. Secondly, it took me a year into my college career to realize that I would have hated the D1 lifestyle. I hated traveling far away for meets, and missing school for meets always stressed me out. I can't imagine having to do that on a more consistent basis.
The only time I really wished I would have gone D1 was my first year. I had a rough XC season, but my indoor and outdoor seasons were great. I remember beating up on a bunch of D1 athletes from schools I "wasn't good enough to run for."
Last point- EVERY single D1 school that I considered experienced a coaching change in the four years I attended college. My D3 school did not. I would say that's more common in D1.