Foot Locker 2014 Is Going to Be Legendary

Don't know why anyone would be an NXN or Footlocker fanboy. There will be no "legendary" national XC championship until Nike and Footlocker get off their high horses and agree to co-sponsor a single event.

I wish there were only one championship again. All of this talk could be avoided if Wilmot, Haney, Cerake, and Anderson were running against these guys.

EvanJ wrote:

I wish there were only one championship again. All of this talk could be avoided if Wilmot, Haney, Cerake, and Anderson were running against these guys.

Half of those guys raced against eachother six times this year, though Wilmot was a bit sporadic dealing with his injury issues, and Dressel got off to a stronger start.

Aside from the season opener for the two runners, Dressel was a consistent 3-5 seconds ahead of Anderson until State, where Anderson had his breakout performance and beat him by 20 seconds. If you take that into account and assume they are close, the answer (if everyone ran the same kind of performance over these last couple weeks) would be that Wilmot would be the fastest.

However, I would agree that things might change if they were all in the same race.

For example, the biggest question would be how well Dressel and Fisher would handle a couple big and sustained mid-race moves as was seen at NXN. Yes, Hardy pushed it a bit at about the same spot as the first move at NXN, but it wasn't sustained and he didn't make a second break like Wilmot did to really give the race that jolt (Dressel did later on as they went up the hill, but imagine if it was more than a 1-on-1 with Maton trying desperately to hang on to guys that were better on the hills than he was). At the Washington State meet, it was Hardy and Anderson that matched the moves to stay in contention while Wilmot and Dressel faded - and at NXN, it was Anderson that faded (though not by all that much) while Wilmot got away. At FLN, no one got away because it was only one move mid-race that didn't shake apart the lead group once the leaders were established - Dressel made a move up the hill, and that is noteworthy, but it also wasn't sustained for very long - and he didn't handle it when it happened to him at State.

Additionally, the layout of the course would change things - imagine if there wasn't a hill on the second loop at FLN - Maton wouldn't have been dropped so easily, and he very likely could have been in contention and mixing it up. He lost the race because he was weaker on the hills, not because he wasn't in as good of aerobic shape or that the surges took more out of him or that he didn't have as devastating a kick. Likewise, if Haney was at FLN instead of NXN, he probably wouldn't have survived the surges as well as he did because he, like Maton, is more of a speed guy and hasn't fared as well on hilly courses either (re: his "off race" at Mt. SAC). He probably would have gotten dropped on the hills as well, and ended up battling it out once again with Hardy like he did at Stanford.

I agree, it is too bad that they didn't all line up at the same race. It would have been interesting, and the outcome probably would have been dependent upon what kind of course they ran on.

Only Half Troll wrote:

Running is an individual sport so we're not sure what the big deal is with teams but if you must have them, then run teams with in FL, simple as that.

Nike simply wants to start a new marketing behemoth and doesn't care if it stamps out a great tradition. There is absolutely no reason to have NXN, and frankly, no kid is going to remember their highs school team 20 years from now, but they will remember if they were best in the nation.

I'm not really a NXN fan. I think that the course is a joke.

That said, your statement that "no kid is going to remember their highs school team 20 years from now" seems WAY off to me. I ran high school XC over thirty years ago - a few years before FL even started. I remember my high school team VERY well. Indeed, the team and our achievements, modest though they may have been, are far more memorable than my own individual wins.

Now in case you want to say that was because I must have been an 18:30 guy who ran JV as a senior - nope, WAY off again. I was tops on my team by well over a minute and a state champion (which was about as far as you could go before FL). Still, it was the team victories that seemed important then and are memorable now - not the individual titles.

I was going to say the same thing earlier, although then I figured he might have might what OTHERS remember. As in, he thinks everyone remembers individual champions, but no one will remember what team won a championship.

I'd disagree with that as well, though. I don't know off the top of my head who won most of the Footlocker races in the mid 90's, but I could tell you that Mead WA '93 and York IL '99 were two of the best teams of all time. And if there was a team championship back then, I'm sure more people would remember what other teams were good back then as well.

Or, if he meant it in some ego-centric way like saying "No one will remember you if you were part of a winning team, but they'll remember you if you won an individual title" ... that's fine, but that's the difference between individual glory and team glory - one is bigger than you. If all you care about is your own glory, just be happy you have track, because you probably didn't have a good team in cross country anyways (good teams usually have pretty good chemistry, and the athletes that make up the team tend to care about the team because they feel like they are a part of it).

These last two post above me are excellent.