I’m jealous of kids that go to highschool in California

This is good trolling. I give it a 9.5/10. Got lots of very serious responses and fired up a bunch of posters.

Yeah, wish I had gone to high school in SoCal, I know it would have been exactly like "Fast Times at Ridgemont High".

There is so much factually wrong with your post that I doubt you lived in California. Where to start? There is no requirement that you live on campus at a UC. Berkeley and UCLA have lotteries…there are not enough dorm rooms for all freshmen who want them. Furthermore, most people live within an hour of a campus…while it makes for a better college experience, living on campus is a luxury, not a necessity. Not sure how old you are, but if your parents made $13k a year currently, that’s not even minimum wage for one worker. If it was 30 years ago, tuition was only $1500 a year. Either way, it’s poor and the state of California looks out for you. A Cal Grant would have covered half your tuition and a Pell Grant the other half. You did something very wrong…probably you’re just not a good troll.

Your high school had a gas station?

No the deep south has only 1 gas station.

I went to San Clemente H.S. in Southern Orange County California in the 70's and it was the best!

Yet you still get people like Grant Fisher and Dathan Ritzenhein out of Michigan who are on the all time prep list though Fisher definitely racheted it up a notch at Stanford. Michigan also has some of the best prep runners in cross country as is the case for other Mid Western states

Respectfully, The weather in West Michigan (Ritz) and Flint (Fisher) is mild compared to the weather in Northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula. While the temperatures might be similar, the snowfall and road conditions are terrible up north which certainly made training a lot more difficult in my youth. Plus, both of those guys had access to indoor tracks when there’s literally nothing like that remotely close to where I grew up.

Not downplaying their achievements or anything, because both of them are amazing.

XC is easy for Midwestern kids to be fast. You've got a few months of non-snow to get fit.

Track is hard, though. Even your "mild" Western Michigan is beyond comprehension for CA kids. Really, you have no idea what it's like to (be able to) wear shorts every day of the year. Inexplicably a lot wear jeans and fleece jackets when it's 80 out though. It's weird.

If you like the look of it that much why don't you get some books on the area, figure out where you'd like to go, and visit - like another poster mentioned. I don't know which state you're in but hopefully it's achievable for you to visit for a few days to a week.

And if you really love it, try to figure out a way to go to college there if you plan on going to college. Look into scholarships, grants, anything like that. Good luck.

I went (and go) to the beach a lot. Friday afternoons? Ha! Once you or your friends get cars, you go to the beach instead of school. I guess what people in crappy weather states don’t realise, the beach is a warm weather activity. At 68 degrees in January, only hardcore surfers (and maybe misinformed tourists) would be at the beach. The water is just too cold without a full wetsuit. So maybe you’d hit the beach in September, but not much later in the year than that. Now, many beach towns are only an hour from snow in the winter. My senior year we’d drive up to the snow (instead of going to class in the AM), fill up a truck bed, then drive back and throw snowballs at freshman during lunch.

There are literally billboards for "Snow Play" around the LA area in the winter months, encouraging people to visit Big Bear, Wrightwood, and other high elevation areas.

So cars drive up there, crash all over the place because nobody can actually drive even when it's not snowy, and the majority of people stop anyway, in the middle of the highway, and let the kids out the instant there's a trace of snow, and they run around like they've never seen snow before in their lives.

Then they think this is what it means when it's snowy elsewhere in the country.

This is not a joke.

It's a common, recurring myth that the typical kid/family in California lives on or near the beach in near perfect, year-round weather prime for beach bods, non-stop partying and myriad other distractions as marketed by song, film, and the California tourist industry.

The reality is that the vast majority of California kids and families grow up 10 to 50+ miles from the coast in suburban & urban settings that are usually 15-30 degrees hotter in the summers and 10-20+ degrees cooler in the winters. For many kids growing up in these paved enclaves or inner city areas, there aren't necessarily ideal training areas, unless your family is on the wealthier side. Training runs can easily consist of sidewalks and asphalt to the nearest park and back while dealing with plenty of traffic and other hazards.

When I was running track and XC in high school and college in the Sacramento Valley, winters generally ran from early November to mid-March with lows occasionally dipping near freezing temperatures with chilly rain and wind common (patterns that are softening a bit due to climate change); nothing like the conditions in the northern or mountain parts of the U.S., yet still far from the stereotype of pleasant coastal So Cal.

It's easy to categorize California as simply the land of soft So Cal surfers, San Fernando Valley airheads, San Francisco Bay Area Fruits and Nuts, or some other broad stereotype, just as it is to paint all Texans as a bunch of gun-toting cowboys, or Southerners as the land of uneducated rednecks, but people and places are always more nuanced than that.

California-while a deeply blue state politically these days-has more registered Republicans (Texas doesn't register its voters) and likely self-reported Christians than any other state. It truly contains multitudes, as the Walt Whitman poem goes. People around the nation embrace this notion of Californians who live for moving to other states to impose their lifestyles and high property values on the 'real' Americans who live elsewhere, but remember that the vast majority of California residents over the last 100 years+ chose to move there from 'real America' to seek better opportunity. They often did, to some extent.

The truth is, the typical kid in California has themselves often dreamed of living in some place like San Diego on the beach, complete with beautiful people and a never-ending stream of things to see and do, all while living in places that were/are a lot more mundane. Rock stars like the Youngs and Sahlmans in upper class areas like Newbury Park/Thousand Oaks might as well exist in another State altogether.

Hi Ryan.

On a more serious note, I tell you where else is like this - Australia. It's marketed (where I am) as an absolute paradise - Neighbours and Home & Away - neverending beaches, surf, beautiful palm trees, mangroves, hot chicks in bikinis and dudes in board shorts, tanned bodies, hanging out at the surf club, not a care in the world. While Australia is an amazing country, that's most likely a small section of it. It's vast and the interior is massive, yet we never see much about that. We just see Sydney really. I'm sure there is real poverty, problems, issues, lack of resources, isolation, lack of opportunities and so on in the parts we don't see.

I grew up in the Inland Empire. There is no beach weather where I'm from. Unless you grew actually by the beach or in a nice city, Cali can be pretty boring and overrated in my opinion. OP, the grass is not always greener on the other side. Not every Californian school is like what you see in the movies. It is true though that we rarely get snow, but it can hot as hell especially in the desert areas.

Yep. For every Mt. Sac (which is nothing if you run in the Midwest and have hills), you have many meets on dirt/sandy roads in a desert. Oh, and one other thing, NO SPIKES ALLOWED.

I graduated from a school literally two miles from the ocean in LA. My parents were not rich, and I was a runner so I never got in with the popular crowd. Yes, the weather was great, and I could run to the beach, which was very nice in mid-late summer and early fall. But again I was a runner so usually all I did was watch the bikini girls playing volleyball and talking to cool guys.

There is kind of a soft culture there, where most young people are waiting around to become a star at something easy like acting or rock music, but never putting in much work towards it. At least that was my experience. A lot of people seem to grow resentful out there when things don't go their way later in life. Or maybe that's everywhere.

Anyway, I moved to NorCal for college and kept on going to the Midwest. Both of my parents and both of my sisters also moved north. It's nice to visit but it feels like a different country to me. I'm glad I didn't raise my kids there.

This is untrue. I’ve been to San Diego twice and it will absolutely live up to your fantasy. Perfect weather, awesome beer, great food, dope spots to run, attractive people, manageable traffic, lots of things to do, great MLB stadium. Would move there in a heartbeat if my wife didn’t claim to “enjoy seasons” so much.