Old Fart Coach wrote:
I have followed collegiate track and field for 40 years and have coached high school for 25, being very fortunate to work with awesome head coaches prior to becoming one myself. I'll get back to this point in a moment.
During all of those years, American television has never been competent in calling track and field meets to the general public. The color commentators are there to call races with exciting voices that people are familiar with from other sports they watch on television. They are only most familiar with the high profile atheltes in the most publicly viewed races ie. 100 meter dash or maybe the mile. The analysts are the "supposed experts" that are used to fill in between the calling of the races but many of them haven't got enough interest in other events outside of the ones that they participated in directly.
Fact: Most track meets are not scored, therefore, these announcers have no experience prepping or following the meet in a way that can span several days but also pay attention to the things that can happen outside of the favorite teams that will have an impact on the final score. Example: Because a couple favorites in the mens 110 HH hit hurdles in the final a couple years ago, the Texas A&M runner finished a couple places higher than he would have. However, their 4 x 400 got all the credit for winning the meet and the hurdler got none for just doing his job but scoring unexpected crucial points that made the difference. The other hurdlers that failed weren't even in the team race. Sometimes the breaks fall your way and sometimes they don't but that's an interesting part of the story that the announcers could never convey unless they were actually competent as to what is developing in the moment.
Now, as a longtime high school coach that deals with scoring meets on a regular basis including the planning of winning championship meets such as conference and state, it would be impossible to not understand what is happening at the collegiate level over the course of several days including the setup through the regional meets. Like some of the writers on this site, I have a higher than average interest in the way the team story plays out, even though it's not a true team event. I watched the West regional meet online. Nice that it's available but who normally would take the time to do that? Only those that care which is fewer than would justify quality broadcasting on a major network.
Therefore, my expectations of television coverage has been about as minimal as they could be knowing full well that if I really want to understand the story of what happened, I need to either attend the meet in person or turn the volume down and follow online. I watched the last World Championship meet onlie with the British announcers and they were fantastic as always. There's just too much information in a scored meet that can't be conveyed in a competent way with the current, long time, long in the tooth, employees such as Rawson, Stones, Hammond, Johnson etc... I personally don't enjoy Bolden all that much but he's about as good as it gets sadly. For crying out loud, they had OJ calling sprint races in the early to mid 80's.
Face it, American interests aren't high enough to warrant top level broadcasting or announcing in the sport of track and field. It's a niche sport among the big 3 ball games and Americans just don't get it or want to.
I'm ok with that and have found other avenues to enjoy the sport with those like myself. Furthermore,I feel like it's really the job of the youth/high school coach to teach our athletes about the sport, it's history, and to put them in a position to view it in a way that they can get a good experience that may last a lifetime and then pass it on including ideas for outreach, promotion and improvement. They don't see or hear the mistakes so much on the tv but eventually will take interest in the sport enough to start paying attention to those details that do matter and to the people that it really matters to, the athletes and future coaches.
Good post.
That being said, it's hard to follow a meet like this in terms of team score without making that your focus. I can't imagine trying to commentate every event and keep up with the team score.
You need good stats people behind you who are making it their sole focus.
i mean i looked up on the internet the night before the final day and saw zero projeected team scores. I've done it in the past but it takes work.
I went up an Oregon SID person and said, "Who has this thing? He said, "I assume A&M. i know oregon isn't winning. When I asked him about the men, he said he had no idea."
As for the numerous annoucing blunders, they need people who know the events. At letsrun, we dont try to be jump experts. Let dwight stick to the jumps. let a distance guy do distances. but hell i didn't even know who the runner-up was for the 1500. now admittedly, I was being paid to do it, I'd know something about everyone in that field.
I think the NCAA should show actual scores and then "projected scores." The projected scores for me would be based of 'experts' picks before the meet and then after the prelims I'd use the times in Eugene for all events below 800.
Their implementation of the winning mark laser was cool for the field events. They should do projected team scores as well.
Hell if you've got money, you could do the projected team scores with some sort of mathematical probabibiltiy. Stats guys could figure out who percentage wise had the best chance to win.