I think there needs to be a balance of understanding that the nature of track and field just won’t allow it to ever be as popular as the money sports like football and basketball, but also needing to do whatever we can to attract more fans.
I don’t think allowing betting on track events or drinking at meets is the answer. That will just enhance the experience for a demographic of people that are already fans. People that don’t know anything about the sport or don’t care about it probably aren’t going to want to bet on it.
I don’t think these mega meets help our cause either. The meets like BU and Bryan Clay are obviously amazing for athletes to perform well, but even as a diehard fan, I get tired of watching 18 heats of 5k. I’m able to stay somewhat engaged though as a coach. I may only have a few athletes racing at meets like that, but I’m following along to see what other relevant athletes are running to see how we are stacking up on the national list. But then think about the other mega meets that have 20 heats of 400 for and 40 heats of 60/200 and 10 heats of the mile and 16 heats of the 4x4. It’s exhausting and boring watching that all day even as a diehard fan.
My parents didn’t know anything about the sport and didn’t care about it until I started doing it. Then they gradually learned more and more about it as they followed me along to high school meets, then college meets, and now more college athletes as I’m a coach now and they like to watch my athletes compete. They still don’t know everything about every event, but my mom likes to sit there at the meets with her iPad and check tfrrs to see if athletes PR or where they sit on the national list. But here’s where we have to accept that our sport will never be like a football or basketball. Even though my parents are much bigger fans of track than the average person, they will never go watch a meet that my team isnt affiliated with. Outside of events with my team, the most they will do as fans of the sport is watch the rarely televised track meet if they stumble across one on tv.
I personally don’t think that scoring meets during the regular season would do much either. For the argument of “it gives ADs something to keep track of”, that may help some programs but I’m sure many still wouldn’t care about regular season meets. Coaches want to do well at nationals. If they have a history of doing well when it matters, they will probably get support from their AD in doing whatever they need to do to continue success at nationals, even if that means making the conference championship less important and sending some athletes to Boston to chase national qualifiers rather than competing at conference. Scoring regular season meets would only become truly meaningful if everyone doing them cared about them and tried which is extremely unlikely.
So anyways, I agree with whoever said it starts with the youth. Try to get more people engaged and educated early to create lifelong fans among the kids and their parents. We just have to accept the fact that for many, this will just be a sport to do on the side and stay in shape for football or whatever else. Kids grow up with dreams of being a professional sports player and making tons of money and it will stay that way for the money sports. But the more kids we can get doing track, the more we will have that continue to do it just for the love of the sport.
But then having more people in the sport creates more of a need for having these mega meets that will allow lots of opportunity for athletes to compete, which I already talked about being boring and exhausting. In terms of attracting fans to come watch a meet that aren’t just there watching their kid, we’re probably better off having a smaller 3 hour meet where it’s just all elite fields. Maybe just host both types of meets. Sometimes we could have those elite meets and then sometimes host the mega meets that allow for as much participation as possible. But as a coach at a place that hosts a lot of meets, finding officials is getting pretty tough. A lot of our officials are very old and are going to either stop officiating soon or to be blunt, they’ll pass away. Not a whole lot of young officials out there so that’s something we need to work on, attracting more young people to get certified and interested in officiating. Most young adults involved in the sport are coaching.
In the end, I feel like track and field would be better as a club sport in America. Even at a university that has quite a bit of revenue from hosting big track meets, our expenses heavily outweigh that. The only reason that is okay is because we are also a very successful program. That’s probably the safest way to save our sport - don’t make it so expensive. Stop spending so much money on scholarships, travel, equipment, etc. Have each athlete pay some club dues each year to help fund some things. But they mostly pay their own way to meets and for their own equipment. Universities that are capable of hosting meets are at a big advantage because at a minimum, maybe they can argue to their AD that the revenue from meets is to fund our coaching salaries. If we don’t have to spend all that money on scholarships, then we are truly bringing more revenue to the university by recruiting student athletes and getting their tuition. Club dues would be very minimal compared to that. If athletes are having to fund their own travel, then it makes competing locally/regionally a bigger deal. Make U23s a bigger deal in America like they are in Europe. Then coaches could stop complaining about BYU or the 26 year old freshmen that come to the NCAA. Also if we did a club system, we could totally disconnect from academic requirements or age/year limitations in the club. Clubs would be made up of mostly students at a university, but I don’t see why someone even has to be a student to be in a club and participate in the sport. Why shouldn’t an athlete be able to keep participating in a club after they’ve done it for 4 years and have graduated? If you’re not having to foot the bill for a big scholarship and they’re paying club dues, let them stick around however long they want. If they get good enough to get sponsored and paid, great. Let them get whatever they want with no restrictions.
That was a little all over the place, but just my 2 cents on various topics. I’m sure there are flaws with some of that, but there’s never going to be a perfect scenario in our sport.