BU Valentine Entry Troubles

There were entry standards. 4:30/5:30 mile. 9:00/11:00 3ks, etc.

Entries just blew up (they claim 30%) so they cut the field after entries were paid. Not sure why they couldn't have seen this coming when looking at DirectAthletics in advance, but I don't envy the problem they faced. That said, they're making unreal amounts of money off of this (men's mile alone around $17.5k).

Exactly. I ran NIRCA for a year before making my college’s team and the track meets always were poorly run. If you weren’t in one of the first heats or events, you’d be waiting 20+ minutes behind schedule.

How long on the average does it take to run a heat of the men's mile from the time the last finisher crosses the line? Is 7-8 minutes reasonable to line up, get one or two runouts plus instructions, run the race, then clear the track after the last finisher so the next heat can line up?

I figure, unless they really cram people into heats (25 for the mile), that the guys portion will take 15 hours - so start at 9am, finish at midnight. Going to run out of toilet paper by noon (so bring your own).

Is the performance list available yet?

Harvard's banked indoor track IS on wooden frames and plywood. The track surface is updated pretty frequently. The inside sprint lanes are springy as all heck.

About the banked indoor track structure:

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The Harvard Track--lap #1 | OESH Shoes

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But Harvard doesn't lease out the facility. Their athletes can pretty much train at any time of the day (to get around class schedules). I think they only make accommodations for pros who travel in for another meet in the city limits.

The heats will start within 5 minutes every time. They line up the runners the absolute moment the last runner crosses the line, and fire the gun writhing 30s on the last finisher. Hardly anyone runs over 4:30, so doing the math, it’s about 4.5-5 min/heat in Boston. They run things very efficiently

I know Harvard's track is banked and wooden and they did all kinds of studies and calculations when designing it, but they must have just messed something up because it's never been as fast as Boston's other banked tracks. Even the rickety old BU Commonwealth Armory track was much faster. I've heard the track has flooded a few times due to the entrance being below grade which, if true, probably hasn't helped. They spent a while resurfacing it a couple years ago, but they should have just torn the whole thing out and started over and made it 200m while they were at it.

As the guy who started the Terrier Classic and the Valentine Inv and threw in a Fastrack Inv along the way, I must say, hearing the complaining about the BU track (it is short, phony times, etc) makes me a bit sad and also nostalgic to a point. When coaches and athletes discovered that running at BU was fun (despite the rats and garbage in the old armory) and exciting (when the new facility was built), putting on these meets was no picnic.

I have written on this forum once before about how coaches and athletes would submit "lifetime best times" in an effort to get into a faster heat. Try keeping track of the 1000's of athletes coming to run, put on the meet, coach your own team and have time to recruit and do all the other aspects that go with being a D1 coach.

We knew who he coaches were that "embelished" and we knew who were the top runners and tried to make sure they got to run against each other. Often times we had to set up 2-3 "top heats" to fulfill that need. Sometimes we missed. I still remember when the George Mason guy in the 400 ran a 45.6 or something close to that out of the second section, running all by himself and no one really paying attention.

We usually did some adjusting the week of the meet, as I did all the entries on my trusty old Mac. No Direct Athletics, no Lancer Timing. By the end of my tenure, I was burned out and happy to move back to being a part time assistant track coach to the wife of one of my former athletes at Columbia (Wally Collins).

So, my suggestion is to be happy you are getting an opportunity to run in a really nice facility, one that can produce mid-outdoor season times in the middle of the winter. Lancer Timing, David Callum and the crew at BU, along with Tommy Maher and Tom Stewart and the rest of the officials do a yeoman's job of putting on a meet that may be long, but consistently runs well. We took pride in being able to put runners up on the track and shoot the gun, usually under a minute after the last prior race was over. It used to be 30 seconds between 200's. Tom was Terrific and the best starter in the business.

If you want to run in a fast heat:

1) Run fast this year and pray that gets you into a fast heat next year.

or,

2) Enter the transfer portal and go to UNC, Georgetown, Indiana, Syracuse or any other Power 5 school because they’re the only teams that get to enter speculative marks that go unchecked. Canadian teams also get a free pass because they don’t use TFRRS.

How can you possibly say the BU coach has been fair? He is rejecting entries that were FAR FASTER than the standards he set out. He took their money and denied their entries. 25-30 seconds off in the 5k, and he charged 50 bucks nonrefundable? There were likely 200 men and women faster than the initial standard that got rejected in the 5k alone, that's $10,000 in the bank w/ probably a lot more in the 3k and mile and other events. That's disgusting.

Why would they invite so many teams? this is entirely avoidable. There were rejected athletes with legit times faster than fake times entered and accepted. why not limit entries per team per event?

Now those teams and athlete are badly screwed over because they were planning on hitting certain qualifying marks and seed times necessary for conference meets. It's too late to change the schedule or to find a fast 5k, and BU stole their money so they couldn't afford to anyway.

Carpenter really dropped the ball here. Disgraceful. Shame on Gabe Sanders too.

Boston does have more meets. Mini meets. Meets during the week. USATF New England is hosting it's association championship Feb 19 at Harvard, Night at The Track Feb 22/March 1 and select open events on March 4 at The Track. The meets exist. Go to them. Run fast. Have fun.

Those are excepted entries. The times will be adjusted for the elite heats and the coaches that lied will go home devastated . The actual heats should be out tomorrow.

To quote the great Al Cantello “ anyone who has run a big meet can complain, all others, shut up”

Sounds like Carpenter is turning into a “Woke Joke” like his boss.

So tell us what teams in the NE-10 should do? Their conference championships start on Thursday the 16th. Should they race on the Wednesday before their conference championships on Thursday?

Or the America East and MAAC schools who have their conference championship starting on the 18th?

Boston's crappy meet management is really shafting those schools and those athletes.

With the addition of basically weekly meets at New Balance, Jordan might be creating a situation like Princeton created with the Larry Ellis Friday night meet.

Sometime around 2015-2017, Princeton's DOps who ran the entries for their meets started changing seed times and moving athletes around from heat to heat based on who he "favored." That meet used to be 2-3 very solid 5k heats, 3-4 solid 1500m heats and usually a slew of 800m heats under the lights on a Friday. Looking at the meet now, it's a shell of itself. They list max field sizes for the Friday sections at: 50 (800m), 48 (1500m), 60 (5000m) and 30 (10000m), but only had full fields in the 800 and 1500. From speaking with other coaches who went to the meet previously, a lot aren't going because of how they were treated, which is sad.

In reality, most of you won't care about the mid-major D1, D2 and D3 programs that are getting shafted by continually being bumped from the meet, but favoritism and creating separate sets of rules based on who you know will kill meets like this in time. I could be completely wrong, but the amount of complaining I've heard in-person from coaches about Jordan's policies is going to cause a problem for someone at some point.