Snowflakes win again. Check this out - Duke's season opening xc meet was held on a track due to rain

VOMIT... I don't think I even had a high school XC changed in the rain or occasional early snow...

“We certainly got a good taste for an hour of what Houston had for days, so we can’t really feel sorry for ourselves,” men’s head coach Norm Ogilvie said. “For the freshmen, it’s their first time out and they had to deal with adversity a little bit, but they handled it really well and they dominated the race.”

For the coach to make any kind of analogy to what victims of Hurricane Harvey is to a cross county meet is incredulous .

It shows how low Duke's standards are now .

He should be terminated .

I think it is more for the volunteers and officials. It is miserable trying to run a meet in bad conditions.

milethon wrote:

I think it is more for the volunteers and officials. It is miserable trying to run a meet in bad conditions.

Yeah ok , then let's make the meet at a cocktail lounge where the coaches and officials can imbibe while the "athletes " time trial on treadmills that the Cs and Os can arbitrarily adjust the speed and the grades from the saloon stool .

Let's just sum this up:

1) they moved their xc race to a track race

2) they reduced it to a 6k and 4k race for men and women

3) duke swept both men and women despite running only freshman and sophomores

4) they started the men's and women's races simultaneously on opposite sides of the track to prevent them from interfering

Why did they even bother? They should have just canceled it.

duke = soft? wrote:

I am stunned by this. I guesss shouldn't be. Remember this is the same team that forfeited at regionals a few years ago.

http://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2017/09/duke-cross-country-freshmen-dominate-bull-city-classic-as-mens-and-womens-teams-win-comfortably

These decisions are usually made by people who are your generation I assume -in their 40s and 50s- Reagan/Bush '88

Rain = not Duke certified.

Is this the Onion?

I think there's some NCAA rule about having an early season meet in order to practice early.

So in other words, this was a training run they call a meet in order to keep the NCAA happy. So who really cares.

The area was also hit with damaging hail before the meet so maybe there was damage to the trail that was not or could not be fixed by the time the races were supposed to start. and as somebody above said the meet like many races in very early Sept are there pretty much just to meet NCAA practice rules

Not sure how this reasoning is the result of snowflakes making the decisions. Give me a break.

"Although the women’s race was initially slated to start at 5:30 p.m. with the men’s race to follow at 6, a lightning delay pushed both groups back to run at the same time at 7."

Amotherone wrote:

Let's just sum this up:

1) they moved their xc race to a track race

2) they reduced it to a 6k and 4k race for men and women

3) duke swept both men and women despite running only freshman and sophomores

4) they started the men's and women's races simultaneously on opposite sides of the track to prevent them from interfering

Why did they even bother? They should have just canceled it.

They couldn't run two separate races???

They cited darkness as a reason for the switch; that sounds kind of plausible. The races were delayed by 60-90 minutes. If it's a narrow trail with thick tree cover, it could be a problem.

not objective wrote:

I think there's some NCAA rule about having an early season meet in order to practice early.

Ding-ding-ding! You have to have an early "meet," to get the early starting date for your first practice. Doubtless Wake and NCCentral, their opponents, were primarily using this race for the same purpose.

So you *have* to get the meet in, and you have to get it in that day. Running the meet at the planned time, while it was hailing (and perhaps lightning?), would open the home team to the potential for a liability suit if someone got messed up. (Friggin' lawyers ruin everything. I should know: I am one.)

Okay, they moved the start to 7:00 PM. "[T]he rain restricted the whole meet to the track due to concerns about mud and darkness on the trail." So instead of starting on the track, going to the trails, and returning to the track--the initial plan--they just stayed on the track.

I'd bet the runners didn't give a crap either way. (They knew the meet didn't "mean" anything, anyway, and it might have been fun to slip and slide around.) As someone mentioned above, it was doubtless 40ish/50ish coaches and administrators who made the change.

Big whoop.

On second thought, it occurs to me that the OP was just trolling. Well played: 6/10.

Not hit by hail ... I live in Durham ..zero hail

Lebensraum wrote:

The area was also hit with damaging hail before the meet so maybe there was damage to the trail that was not or could not be fixed by the time the races were supposed to start. and as somebody above said the meet like many races in very early Sept are there pretty much just to meet NCAA practice rules

Smart move by then for the reasons mentioned above. Anyone disagreeing clearly does not understand NCAA rules.

I agree the darkness concern was probably an issue. Also, any possibility that the thought process was, "we've already had a lightning delay, if there's more lightning while people are out on a trail racing, how do you pull them all off quickly and is there quick access to shelter?" It's a lot easier to pull people off a track in the case of lightning during the race and get them into shelter than if there spread out over varying distances on a trail.

It was definitely the darkness. The trail is thickly covered with overhanging branches and it probably would have been difficult to see by the end. But who schedules a meet to start at 5PM anyway?

Did they do that for the sake of the people or the course?

When I was a kid we played soccer in all kinds of conditions. Rain, wet fields, etc. now they cancel games at the drop of a hat, but it's not to protect the players, but the fields. Playing soccer on wet fields tears them up. I remember well how bad our fields got.

Not sure if XC does much damage or not.