I don't know about Stanford but I think building an outdoor track on the roof of BU, if they actually can, would be a waste of money and space. The outdoor season here is a real crap shoot in terms of the weather you'll get in the spring at least while universities are in session. It would not be at all unusual to be up on that roof on a damp 41 degree day with wind coming off the ocean and full exposure because you're on a roof even in late April. If you want fast times in April at BU you're on more solid ground just to keep running indoors.
Economics of BU Meet
College Running
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Oh my bad, I meant could a California school build a 200m track with no roof, ie an outdoor track, not that a California school should build an outdoor track on the BU roof. That is kinda hilarious tho
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Agreed 1000 percent. We live in state college and penn state is very restrictive on track use and charges an exorbitant amount of money to use it...as is typical. We have taken our kids to race at the youngstown open meets and it is like trying to get taylor swift tickets trying to get into that meet. It's 15 per entry up to 2000 total entries. There is clearly a huge demand. Most of the teams are pgh but bullis competes there and Toronto clubs.
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The only reason BU is popular is because the secret that is the Coast Guard Academy indoor track has not reached the general population
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ivyrunner wrote:
yinzerr wrote:
Pennsylvania, according to Wikipedia, is 266 and 737,288 respectively.
PA overall has almost 6mm more people, and where Pittsburgh is situated, it would pull from all of Western Ohio, which is a Massachusetts of its own. Your data point only validates my perspective.
Technically you are correct but I don't think that necessarily helps your argument. PA may have about twice as many colleges and students as MA but it's also almost four times as big in terms of area. And PA's biggest population center is on the other side of the state from Pittsburgh. According to Google, driving from Philly to PA takes 5 hours and 4 minutes and driving from Philly to Boston takes 5 hours and 20 minutes. A track in Pittsburgh might work out but not because it would be attracting all colleges/students from PA.
Exactly. Not sure Pitt would be best place for such a facility.
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Pitt already has a 200m indoor track and is currently building a 300m one:
Also, Youngstown State is only 1 hour away and already has a 300m indoor.
Don't know about the quality of them though, I'd assume worse than BU.
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Bounceville wrote:
…..it's not so much the economics of a banked track …… but rather a banked, wood-framed track.
Nobody is forking over a penny to run on the black hole of slowness, pain and rigidity that is Michigan.
BU used to continually be accused of being short, but it’s just the energy return (perception) and microscopic feeling of give from the design. It’s getting to the point of ridiculousness in terms of enabling time chasing that seemingly cannot be replicated indoors or outdoors.
I don’t have any patience for the old men shouting at shoe-doping clouds, but there is likely a strong argument for standardizing acceptable facilities for allowable times. Would be the death of BU, but at this point, is it the same as a net downhill marathon? yeah you still have to do the work, but can 90% of the field replicate that on any other setting? that’s problematic.
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Its gonna happen wrote:
The only reason BU is popular is because the secret that is the Coast Guard Academy indoor track has not reached the general population
The fastest oversized track in the East.
Once started a race in the long jump runway. You never know where the handoff zone is gonna be. 180m rollercoaster.
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it generates money but a lot of it is probably used to send the TF team to other meets, buy equipment, etc. or to help fund other teams. you're also conflating getting revenue with turning a profit on the team overall. my general store can sell $500/day in goods but lose money on an overall monthly basis after paying rent and payroll and such.
also, you're treating all things as equal. what do you think happens if Joe's College Invitational starts charging $100/athlete, and $200/unattached? you realize a lot of who is paying these entries are colleges themselves?
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HRE wrote:
Interesting. I grew up close to where you are but have been gone for decades, though I get back pretty often and pay attention to sports there. One of the reasons I moved away aside from it being hard to find a decent job was that it was mostly a wasteland in terms of running and racing. That certainly has changed as far as road races go.
But has it for track, at least as much as it would make it seem like you'd get a decent return on a $50 million investment? From where I am now I'm skeptical. I'm from Johnstown. As far as I know, none of the high schools there have indoor track. I may dig into that a bit more. But in Massachusetts pretty much every high school has indoor track. Again, I'm interested in your answer.
As far as college indoor track in western Pa., Penn State has a good facility that's not hard to get to and flying to Boston or bussing or flying to New York is not all that hard or expensive. I think one other thing that draws schools to indoor meets in Boston and New York is the attention those cities get from having high profile pro meets there. Finally, I know from experience that Pittsburgh is far from being the hardest city in the US to fly to but it's not exactly one of the easiest either.
Didn’t there used to be a pretty big road race in Johnstown?
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Ffff wrote:
HRE wrote:
Interesting. I grew up close to where you are but have been gone for decades, though I get back pretty often and pay attention to sports there. One of the reasons I moved away aside from it being hard to find a decent job was that it was mostly a wasteland in terms of running and racing. That certainly has changed as far as road races go.
But has it for track, at least as much as it would make it seem like you'd get a decent return on a $50 million investment? From where I am now I'm skeptical. I'm from Johnstown. As far as I know, none of the high schools there have indoor track. I may dig into that a bit more. But in Massachusetts pretty much every high school has indoor track. Again, I'm interested in your answer.
As far as college indoor track in western Pa., Penn State has a good facility that's not hard to get to and flying to Boston or bussing or flying to New York is not all that hard or expensive. I think one other thing that draws schools to indoor meets in Boston and New York is the attention those cities get from having high profile pro meets there. Finally, I know from experience that Pittsburgh is far from being the hardest city in the US to fly to but it's not exactly one of the easiest either.
People tend to way overestimate how profitable business are. They make guesses at income and ignore all the costs. And it can take years to build up the cachet to have people filling up your fields.
More facilities like BU would result in diminishing returns as you increase the supply each school wouldn’t be charge as high of entry fees.
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100% wrote:
HRE wrote:
Why don't other schools build a similar track? Doing that is going to cost a good bit of upfront money and you're not guaranteed you'll get the kind of business BU does. I'm not even going to try to count how many schools there are within an hours or so drive of BU that have track teams, let alone the number within what most consider a reasonable drive but it's really big. There are also loads of running clubs as well. Few locales have anything close to the potential track users that BU does. And in the event a school beyond driving range wants to send people a fast track with good competition to chase times flying to Boston is one of the easiest flights you can find.
Just as a semi extreme example, ask how many schools with track teams are within a couple hours' drive of Orono, Maine and how simple it is to fly there. Then ask yourself why a school chasing times would want to send a team there when it's easier and cheaper to go to BU?
Take this a bit further and imagine you're an out of school runner who isn't world or national class but is still competing seriously on the track. Maybe you're just looking to get your 3,000 under nine minutes or your 800 under two minutes. The odds are that you and most others like you live a lot closer to BU than to the U. of Maine, or lots of other schools. Indoor track is a really, really, big thing in Boston and its general region and as such there is a lot of demand for a good indoor track, so much so that New Balance decided it was worthwhile to build another one. But most universities are in places where it's unlikely they'd get enough return on their investment to justify building auch a facility.
100%. It's far easier to fly into Boston, or Seattle if you're on the west coast, than to fly into Arkansas or South Bend (or Chicago and drive 2 hours).
With how fast they run at BU the conversation with my female athlete recently was can you race in Boston next year....we are in 🇦🇺
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Runner10287 wrote:
Didn’t there used to be a pretty big road race in Johnstown?
There was a road race, but nothing big about it. Nothing big of anything in Central Pa when you think about it.
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mad question asking, no blunt passing wrote:
why don't other schools build a similar track?
Because the designs and blueprints of the BU track is a well guarded secret.
Wouldn't want to have a rival University generating a deluge of PBs every February. Not good for business.
Fun fact: in Boston "let's bounce" doesn't mean "let's get outta here" like it does everywhere else. It means "let's race on the BU track". Just one of those quirky things Bostonians say.
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HRE wrote:
Why don't other schools build a similar track? Doing that is going to cost a good bit of upfront money and you're not guaranteed you'll get the kind of business BU does. I'm not even going to try to count how many schools there are within an hours or so drive of BU that have track teams, let alone the number within what most consider a reasonable drive but it's really big. There are also loads of running clubs as well. Few locales have anything close to the potential track users that BU does. And in the event a school beyond driving range wants to send people a fast track with good competition to chase times flying to Boston is one of the easiest flights you can find.
Just as a semi extreme example, ask how many schools with track teams are within a couple hours' drive of Orono, Maine and how simple it is to fly there. Then ask yourself why a school chasing times would want to send a team there when it's easier and cheaper to go to BU?
Take this a bit further and imagine you're an out of school runner who isn't world or national class but is still competing seriously on the track. Maybe you're just looking to get your 3,000 under nine minutes or your 800 under two minutes. The odds are that you and most others like you live a lot closer to BU than to the U. of Maine, or lots of other schools. Indoor track is a really, really, big thing in Boston and its general region and as such there is a lot of demand for a good indoor track, so much so that New Balance decided it was worthwhile to build another one. But most universities are in places where it's unlikely they'd get enough return on their investment to justify building auch a facility.
The track is like a Stradivarius. It was built by maestros. It is not your typical industrial design product. It could be a long time before someone puts as much care into the design of a track. See:00 -
Runner10287 wrote:
HRE wrote:
Interesting. I grew up close to where you are but have been gone for decades, though I get back pretty often and pay attention to sports there. One of the reasons I moved away aside from it being hard to find a decent job was that it was mostly a wasteland in terms of running and racing. That certainly has changed as far as road races go.
But has it for track, at least as much as it would make it seem like you'd get a decent return on a $50 million investment? From where I am now I'm skeptical. I'm from Johnstown. As far as I know, none of the high schools there have indoor track. I may dig into that a bit more. But in Massachusetts pretty much every high school has indoor track. Again, I'm interested in your answer.
As far as college indoor track in western Pa., Penn State has a good facility that's not hard to get to and flying to Boston or bussing or flying to New York is not all that hard or expensive. I think one other thing that draws schools to indoor meets in Boston and New York is the attention those cities get from having high profile pro meets there. Finally, I know from experience that Pittsburgh is far from being the hardest city in the US to fly to but it's not exactly one of the easiest either.
Didn’t there used to be a pretty big road race in Johnstown?
Not that I know of. There was a marathon there for decades going back to 1974, I think. It's been gone for a few years. It was never a big race by any means. I don't know of any race they have there that isn't essentially a local race. Might you be thinking of Youngstown and the old International Peace Race? The cities are not real far apart and have a common post steel industry existence.
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real question is how much did it cost to build the BU indoor facility?
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I worked out how much money is made at this meet based on entries and the cost of these entries:
Total: $291,700
Women Entries: $142,775
Male Entries: $148,910
The event generating the most money was the men’s mile at $32,475.
On top of this they charge parking and an admission fee of $12 per person.
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And the track team still loses money.
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