AARON SAHLMAN TO NAU

1:48, 4:01 and 8:01 Isn't quite a speed monster. I think Aaron likes the 800m because Lex took the 3200 and Leo took the 1600m

Aaron beat Lex here

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brosnan did not want him at UCLA??!!? what are you taking about?? dumbest think i have heard on this forum all year.

fact is brosnan goes home DEVASTATED

Aaron Sahlman had grades that forced him to look at schools like NAU, Arkansas. UCLA makes exceptions, but has standards at the same time. Academic schools are not a goos fit for everyone and that ok. Lot's successful people don't have to go to UCLA, Harvard or Stanford. Those schools are not for everyone. Being is HS coach I'm sure Brosnan tried with admissions, but there is only so much you can do.

OK, I know little about NCAA running, team dynamics, and school's sponsorship deals. From what I have gathered here on the Board, the shoe and uniform sponsor (nearly always Nike, but NAU is a notable exception) has a deal with the school but not with any athletes. Like, maybe the AD or some administrators signed something, but no student has and therefore they technically and legally have no obligations to any brand.

So, what would have happened if King Ches stepped up to the line gunning for his 15th title, and he has.... Mizuno on his feet! Phil yells at VP, VP yells at AD, AD yells at coach, coach yells at Ed. All that certainly would go down, but no one could really do anything about it, right?

So here we are. A Nike-loyal runner goes to adidas school. Now, saying this kid wears exclusively Nike or is Nike-loyal is true. It is also a huge understatement. There was a swoosh on each singlet and Brosnan's jacket. There was a thread about Beaverton sending a couple young stars there with shoes. Nike is so ingrained in NP culture that the brass may have thought of them like a farm team just like they think of U of Oregon. NAU runners over the last few years never considered wearing anything else.

Many of you will remember thread about Nico in which a pic of him with Nikes, sans-swoosh, in his hands was posted. He's walking off the track, in NAU garb, and the shoes had adidas-like stripes drawn on. The crowd here immediately identified them as Nike, and various posters commented to that effect. That went on for maybe a year, after which he switched to adidas. So what's this next kid going to do?

He's never worn anything else, and probably hasn't really been around other brands much (high school races rarely have a non-Nike in them) so what happens when he gets to Flagstaff? He has 3 choices:

Wear the Swoosh the whole time there, much to the disappointment of the coach and school in general. If this is the plan, I see him going somewhere else after a year, or at most 2, just due to peer pressure and heat from the AD and coach.

Wear Nike until the pairs he has now are worn out. At that point, the tempation of adidas freebies and pressure from within the school and team have him taking a few pair and switching. This was Nico's M.O. One year of not toeing the party line may not get you socially excommunicated.

Go with the flow. Show up with the Swoosh on foot day 1 (every incoming high schooler does, right?) and wear them just until the assistant coach or whoever deals with adidas gets your order in hand. After a week or so, you're on board with the 3 stripes.

Which route does he go?

With a kid on a team that is Adidas sponsored I can tell you our experience.

Nike can be worn only if there are no photographers/film crews around at practice. However, any official team trips, dinners, outings, races etc no competitor brands are allowed AT ALL. Period no questions asked and NO exceptions. If a photographer/Flotrack/ etc are present at practice it's only Adidas.

I do believe, and correct me if Im wrong.. Nico wore the Nikes at the trials or USA's? correct? Not an NAU college race

I think it was at Drake Relays

When I see posts like this I think it is a naive kid, or someone in a blue blood bubble. Elite schools help you get in a room, they might be a difference between the "interview pile" and the "discard pile" of a job. They also offer immense opportunities to take advantage of for the purposes of your own education. So it's not nothing.

But those opportunities exist at pretty much any large state school if you want them. And professional advancement depends much more on the quality of the individual than where they went to school.

For an example, 11-time cross country national champion and 2-time Olympian Pat Porter went into business after his long running career. By his untimely death he was quite successful, armed only with a degree from Adams State (back when it was Adams State College), a school with much lower regard than NAU. Whereas RoJo went to Princeton and spends all day talking about right-wing grievances with teenagers.

Leo and Lex didn’t run in the southern section or state meets so they didn’t take any distance away from Aaron.

Top plumbing and roofing companies recruit from NAU still though, correct? I am deliberating over Arizona State or NAU. Decision has caused me great anxiety. Was trying to calculate what my savings would be if I got the same quality, if not better, plumbing job from NAU, how much I could put into Bitcoin, and what that would be worth in 5 years. Unfortunately, I had a hard time understanding if my investment would be worth more or less in 5 years in bitcoin. Regardless, I know I am on the right path with either of these schools.

Didn’t Lex and Leo get into Stanford solely because of running?

No.

I don't know why people rag on NAU academics. Sure, it's no Stanford, but Stanford is Stanford. There might be ~20 schools in the country where the name of the school gets your foot in the door. Outside of those, as long as you have a degree, no one will look twice at the college you went to. No employers care if you got your degree from NAU or Colorado. There's also way more to college than academics. I don't think I've met a single person who said "I chose to go to my college because out of all the schools I applied to, it had the best academics". It's normally a mix of the campus, finances, and knowing people who were already there/having some kind of support system (like an XC team).

I'm excited to see what he can do at NAU running-wise. 1:48 as a junior is stupid fast. Maybe he'll be the next Beamish. Maybe in a few years he'll decide he doesn't want to pursue running. Either way, going to NAU is a good choice.

I have to say I don't remember what the thread that some of us saw was titled exactly. If someone finds it, maybe it says where the pic came from. It was an orange pair of Dragonflies (what every NP kid wears as well as possibly most high schoolers in general) with swoosh removed and 3 stripes drawn on. I thought it was funny, and so did a bunch of posters it seemed. I don't think it was a USATF thing. May have been Drake; seems like it was about that time of year maybe. My memory is dim, though, and I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to it.

But **, or whover else may have experience with this kind of thing: do they really have any authority to enforce the school's official sponsor thing? I mean, what would actually happen if Ches (just because he was so high profile at Nike's most prized school) had worn a random brand at the televised D1 champs? I realize that a dozen people would be screaming and freaking out, but would there be any meaningful consequence? What could they actually do?

The only reason this is a topic in my mind is that first, it is the understatement of the century to say that Nike dominates high school sports. Peer pressure is meaningful at 15, and if you don't go along with the upperclassmen and leaders of the team, there are a dozen dudes laughing at you at best...2 dozen fists enforcing unofficial rules at worst.

Second, NP is even more that way. There is no possibility a new kid showed up at Brosnan's practice 3 years ago with Asics in his gym bag. This includes the subject of this thread. It is only a high school, but very much a Nike school. These situations create a generation of teenagers who have never worn anything else and are extremely Nike-loyal.

Third, most (not all) NCAA distance programs are Nike-sponsored. The ones that get any press. The ones that high profile, Nike-shod high schoolers go to anyway. So generally there is no transition to make. No one will object to the shoes you showed up with on day 1. Every runner and coach is also wearing what you walked in there with. But what happens when it's an adidas school? Nico got away with Nike for 1 XC season and 1 track season, I think. What will happen in this case?

He was a cop and not exactly the collegiate type.

I really don’t think he wore Nike for any season … less yet 2.
Yes they can enforce the rule. College scholarships are alway different than HS peer pressure.
From my kids perspective why would they not comply?? Great school, awesome team, scholarship .. and yes they not only grew up wearing Nikes but prefer them. Still dons Adidas for the team.

I don't have an answer to your main question, though I think you may be overestimating the chokehold that Nike has on both college sponsorships and high school kids.

Off the top of my head, NAU and NC State are Adidas, while Wisconsin and Notre Dame are Under Armour. Those are four strong running schools. I don't have any interest in looking through race photos to see what athletes like Nuguse and Hacker were wearing on their feet in their biggest races, but I don't think non-Nike schools are as big of an anomaly amongst strong distance programs as you seem to suggest.

Also, I feel like I see high schoolers wearing a pretty wide variety of brands? Many high schoolers get into running through their parents, and their parents often have tried a wider variety of brands and aren't swayed by Nike being "cool". I've known plenty of high schoolers who train in Asics, Brooks, or Saucony because their parents have been running recreationally in those brands for years. Additionally, I'd say that Hoka is actually the running shoe brand with the most cache amongst young women generally (they've done quite a bit of work with "active lifestyle" influencers, and are part of certain aesthetic trends online). I also think that New Balance has done a solid job of marketing their spikes to high school girls.

My guess is that you're not one of those that remebers pics of Young in poorly-disguised Dragonflies nor the thread about him that ended up being partially about just that. I don't know what to search for to link the thread or even just post the pic I saw in the thread. At any rate, he went to adidas for last indoor season as far as I saw. 9 or 10 months ago was the first time I ever saw a pic of Nico in adidas. Other posters on that thread a while back certainly realized he was in Nike just because it was so obvious, but others here seem to remember it. Thing is, he wasn't punished for it. But it is absolutely true he bucked the system in that regard. Look at any freshman pics you can find.

Now, I'm not telling anyone to break any rule, whether an actual, legal one or a de facto one. (I somewhat disrespected Young for it, in fact.) Least of all your son or daughter. But you DO acknowledge that they wore Nike before college. Grew up with them, wore them in high school, and still prefer them. Exactly. It's pretty ingrained. You kid's school doesn't have an anti-Skechers rule. It doesn't need one. No one has ever shown up fresh out of high school with a pair.

And I'll say I completely agree with the 'why wouldn't they comply' part. I mean, I would greatly prefer adidas to Nike myself, but I didn't have any pressure to wear the swoosh as a teenager. I was in high school decades before Nike took over that world. There was no pressure to go that route. Brooks and NB were more popular 40 years ago.

At any rate, the NP to NAU kids are all very Nike-oriented (you know today's teenagers better than I do and NP was the same Nike-wise but magnified) and will know what Nico got away with if even I found out about from this very Board.

The nikka stronghold is over. When other shoe companies realized they had changed the rules, they rose to the challenge and offer as good or better. Even Under ARMOUR; witness NYCM results.