Are high school cross country tryouts the norm?

At my alma mater the coach had to start having try outs to limit the number of athletes. I believe insurance cost was the primary motivator for limiting the team size.

The tryout was a mile around the track and the cutoff times depended on your grade. Freshmen may not have had a cutoff time. My coach had his known faster ~10 runners pace students trying out. We had a massive squad cheering on the last few to slip under 6 minutes my senior year (I think that was the sophomore or junior cutoff, can't remember exactly). My coach would try to make exceptions for students that put in the work and contributed to the team. For the record, we were a top 5 school in our section for all divisions and a contender at state in our division. My senior year Rich Gonzalez ranked us in the top 15 in California for all divisions in his preseason rankings

That sounds like a great program. The 6 min/mile for a soph or junior is more than fair. At that point, they have been in the program for a year, and know the expectations. And making allowances for a few who don't quite meet it, but display positive traits, is a sign of a great coach.

Cutting freshmen, maybe in California is normal, but not elsewhere.

Several teams in our conference have over 100 boys on their rosters. They use 2 busses. A few others are similar to ours in that they would have 60-75 if they didn't cut. The one bus amd 2 coach level seems to be pretty consistent in the area.

personally my suggestion for the parent goes as follows. get your kid in shape now. maybe mix in some speed work because they have to try to get faster. get your kid where he can run all his workouts and not have to walk anything or blow up. where he is harder for the coach to pick on.

show up, try hard. if he makes it, either the work paid off or the coach was full of it. my college soccer coach always talked up his season starting fitness test and yet everyone seemed to pass.

if he's cut and he wants to run XC still, look around for road races, and for the regional private meets november/december. find events where you pay an entry fee and he's in. voila, you're still a runner.

in the spring my suggestion would be try some new events, field stuff, jumps, throws, hurdles, shorter races, depending on his build and skill set. not sure if someone running ~25 for 5k is necessarily where they are meant to be. keep an open mind.

Our football holds tryouts for a week and they cut about 50 kids every year. I don't know exactly how many they keep but I think it is tied to equipment and coaching. Not all kids travel so busing is not really the issue.

trying to give the parents information as opposed to abstractly backing the coaching union on whatever choices they make, even if they can afford more players, surely looking at recent years' meet results on something like milesplit or athletic would hint at how many kids make the team/run meets and whether they really do cut off at some time level. this is what i advise kids looking at college all the time. are there tons of kids on the team or few, how do you stack, are they faster or slower than you. if there are kids on the actual team running 25 at meets last year then either the cutoff rumor is wrong or the story is more complicated. if every kid is running 19 or below then it's real. there should be a fairly apparent concrete answer one can gather from looking at the meet results, rather than listening to people justifying a cut that may not exist.

you might also know some of the HS kids' parents. ask if it's true. if they say, oh, he says that, but it's just to scare the kids into showing up in shape, there's your answer. you show up in shape and he won't care how fast. or they say it's real and you train this summer like you have to chase a cutoff.

we have dozens per football team for multiple levels. and those kind of teams can justify roster limits, if they want, because realistically the more they carry the odds reduce that you ever see the field all season. versus XC if there are no entry limits your kid runs week 1 as long as he's allowed on the team. that is then down to how many kids are interested versus budgets versus the baby fascist standards business. i fight the last bit because i knew some friends who were marginal in the early stages but almost made state at the end. that and i think independent of team results saying you cut people sends a symbolic message. but i've been on school sports teams that due to injuries were short on travel squads, and didn't pick up the phone for the cut kids. the symbolism can be self defeating.

and you're missing my point which is that if they can carry dozens of football players with expensive equipment and training apparatus, probably 2 buses plus some vans of shoulder pads and helmets, but they can't afford more singlets and bus drivers for XC? does not compute.

also strikes me as the sort of thing booster clubs could easily fix. you could probably outfit a whole runner for what one football helmet costs.

again, my sense is there are programs that use standards to instill fear but they actually have modest or low numbers, and there are programs with legit participation bulk, but those are few and far between. and then most teams would gladly take anyone who shows up because there are 3 kids on JV and 2 kids on frosh. and how fast they are has little to do with whether the fastest kid from the team is going to regionals or state. in fact, encouraging more kids to sign up might give you more lottery tickets to improve the roster.

if you can coach. if not, yeah, tell everyone above 20 not to show up and voila, team of guys with varsity or high JV times, artificially.

in practical terms, my advice is count bodies on race results and see where the slowest kids finish. if the total runners count to some nice round number, or everyone is faster than a time, that's your answer. your kid needs to make that roster limit or cutoff time.

I had tryouts when I was coaching at a school that had difficulty getting kids to join the cross country team; it seemed to draw out some kids who didn't join otherwise. It was a 1-mile time trial and I only didn't keep a kid if they couldn't complete it.

Usually it is the parents of the slow kids who are the problem more so than the kids themselves.

all due respect but if you could coach, when you train up some star or the team does something, that is the real sales pitch. when a select soccer team on the make wanted me to join up, they didn't advertise their cut policy. they told me they wanted to win state. i saw who else was starting to join up at the same time, who i knew from league, and took them at their word. and we won state twice.

no, i don't buy this crap at all.

athletic.net

Track & Field, Cross Country Results, Statistics

Meet results and team scores.

Link:www.athletic.net/CrossCountry/meet/234...

to expose the utter crap on here, this is a top 4 TF team in TX with nothing but distance runners. literally can't even get top 3 in its district because they get next to no field, relay, hurdle, or sprint points. but gets top 4 in state because all they do is distance.

they also routinely win state XC or come close.

this is what their JV team looks like. if you count they have dozens and dozens of kids. they win JV district with their first 5 finishing 1-2-3-4-5 under 17 min.

but if you keep scrolling, they have several kids >20 and a kid as slow as 29.

you are trading in utter bull with your pretend "standards." this program gets dozens of kids in, wins with the best, promotes them to varsity, but includes everyone. the slow kids do not ruin it for the fast ones. they give themselves dozens of lottery tickets and plenty pay off.

like i said, i get budget but if you had a state winning team with dozens of kids wanting to play your school should find the effing budget for your powerhouse, by trimming a couple football slots. but the idea you need to symbolically guilotine the slow ones to motivate the fast ones is a big fat lie.

the best soccer teams in TX in the 90s were plano's teams, who used their 5000 kid enrollment to turn outdoor 11 man into an indoor style game with whole shift-changes for subs. they would show up 35 kids on a team against standard 18 man teams with cuts. they would keep running fresh select players on at the other team. you would get tired. they would win.

you're wrong. you're wrong. you're wrong. you're just not creative enough to get it.

More athletes=faster athletes=faster team.

I've seen many freshman go from 25 minutes to sub 18/17 senior year and sub 10 by track. It's how running works for most, it stacks, it takes time.

Cutting freshman is a terrible strategy, most boys haven't even started their growth then. Even junior to senior year is a massive jump for some especially in XC. The upperclassmen tend to be faster because they are grown, have put more miles in over time, and are less likely to get injured because running while growing is very hard on the body. Talent can take time to show.

I'd say find a school/coach that focuses on development of student athletes and not doesn't cut. 20 minutes cutoff is wild especially early season when it's hot and humid. How many athletes survive this program and run well after? How many make it through college running still able to run? Running high schoolers into the ground is a recipe for wasted talent that we have seen time and time again.

Ok, sweetie.

Unless there's a safety issue due to coaching staff size I don't think it's good to cut kids. You never know what they will get from it. Now for disciplinary reasons/non-compliance, sure.

Those that are making the analogy to football are missing the point that football shouldn't cut without good reason, either. That doesn't mean the kid has to play. The real question to ask is "Why do high school sports exist?" It's not to create an elite roster to make yourself feel like a somebody.

We very strongly suggest that everyone shows up with some level of fitness like the ability to run two miles without stopping or walking. First day of practice is always a two-mile run on the track. We won't cut anyone the first three weeks, but if they skip practices, lollygag through workouts, or get caught walking during off-campus distance runs, then we have no hesitations about booting them off of the squad. No program needs a bunch of lazy cancers around. Once a couple of kids start walking or goofing off, others join in. We nip that in the bud and quickly.

I'm running a program for athletes that want to improve and represent themselves and their school to the best of their abilities. I am not running a Couch-to-5K fitness program or creating subscribers for Runner's World.

It's been quite a few years since my kids ran HS XC. They ran at a very college prep oriented public school. A lot kids wanted a sport on their resume' for college applications, and they (or their parents) decided XC was the easiest place to do it. There were about 75 young women out for XC at the start of the season, out of whom probably 15 were serious about competing. The coach started with very solid, but not unreasonably difficult workouts from the beginning of the year, and a strict no-missed workouts without a valid excuse policy. By the first meet, the team was down to 35-40 young women.

Similar to my school. Half of the kids are out for XC to boost their Ivy League application. They do the absolute bare minimum. There is a safety issue with large numbers that some can't grasp. Our long run is 12 miles for top kids. It is 4 miles for a few freshmen who struggle to run. We have kids with learning disabilities. We have 14 year olds who get lost one block from the high school. Imagine sending 100 kids out through 25 stop lights and having 20 get lost. I worry everyday out on our runs that somebody will get hit.

This is such a dumb policy, I've had multiple freshman who could not break a 20 minute 3 mile go on to do great things like placing on the podium at XC and track state, set school records, qualify for Nike/Newbalance national track meets. Don't let the dumb cut off time discourage your son.

Nobody wants to cut kids. Coaches cut for safety reasons and for budgetary reasons. Every coach would want to keep as many kids as possible knowing that there are always some who will become great runners.

But your claim that you know NXN qualifiers who were 21 minute 5k runners is false. Name 3 and you will be taken seriously.