An Interesting Proposal To Save The Fall XC Season: Implement Interval Starts

Forget it.

The plan is to keep these lockdowns going thru the end of 2021.

round and round wrote:

I'm pretty sure I wrote this idea out in some detail on a cross country thread about 5-6 weeks ago. I know Rojo was on that thread too

And your point is? We didn’t say the author invented the idea. The New York Times publishes plenty of editorials where the writer isn’t the only person with that idea

We've all gone mad.

There is ZERO chance of a high school cross country runner dying from COVID19.

Stupid people!

4 pages and nobody else willing to discuss how looped courses can handle staggered starts fairly. The last 2 NCAA championships were held on looped courses. The Griak meet starts and finishes in reverse direction. The famed Peoria course runs a loop that is less than 1 mile.

No, but teenagers can pass the virus to others.... coaches, parents, other relatives, teachers, bus drivers, etc. It's not that difficult to understand the challenges we're facing due to COVID.

New Queen wrote:

4 pages and nobody else willing to discuss how looped courses can handle staggered starts fairly. The last 2 NCAA championships were held on looped courses. The Griak meet starts and finishes in reverse direction. The famed Peoria course runs a loop that is less than 1 mile.

Don't use looped courses, what is so hard to understand? There are plenty of other places to run.

rocky mtns wrote:

No, but teenagers can pass the virus to others.... coaches, parents, other relatives, teachers, bus drivers, etc. It's not that difficult to understand the challenges we're facing due to COVID.

Then protect those people at risk as we have done historically for all other communicable diseases. Don't quarantine those who are essentially not at any risk.

Remember, there will be no cc meets unless school has opened and the runners will be coming to the meets from buildings containing hundreds and thousands of kids, teachers and administrators of all ages.

The odds of an ambulatory adult of any age dying of this virus is now the same or even less likely than the other flu/corona viruses.

The odds of a kid dying in an auto accident on the way to the meet are undoubtedly higher than dying from this virus. Perhaps we should mandate that now and forever all runners must arrive at the race on foot, if we truly care and we're all in this together.

I think it’s silly that we’re even considering not having fall sports, as some exposure to the virus is necessary to start cultivating mass immunity, and more and more evidence is showing that being outdoors and getting sunlight helps blunt the virus (versus being locked in a room recirculating air with no exercise or natural vitamin D). I agree that certain segments of the population still need to be quarantined. Seems like common sense.

However, it is becoming more likely that fall sports aren’t happening. Our state athletic association established a task force to rank sports by risk in an attempt to accommodate most or all sports at varying times through the season. Tennis and golf for both boys and girls were deemed low risk, as was swimming as long as social distance requirements could be met. Cross country was categorized as medium risk, as was track, but track only in so much as certain objects were shared or, potentially, social distancing would be hard to implement.

Personally, I would be fine with switching track and cross country seasons, and letting the distance events do staggered starts by seed in track. No spectators beyond coaches and essential personnel allowed. Masks and distance still required when not competing. There’s absolutely no reason not to do something like this. We are mostly robbing our kids to save the elderly and those who have neglected their health. Of course there are outliers who have genetic hurdles to overcome.

Finally, it’s becoming more apparent that oxygen and rebreather masks are far more efficacious treatment than multiple hardcore sedative drugs and ventilators. Private doctors have had great success with hydroxychloroquine AND ZINC. All of this stuff is easily scalable for the masses, but it doesn’t pay well...

Wake up. The NCAA plans out the regionals and national championships 2 years in advance. Maybe you want to pay OK St $1M that they will lose when you randomly pull the meet from them. Or since you claim to have a course, please propose it because none of the NCAA decision makers are aware of it.

Nice idea, not gonna happen. The governing bodies are lazy and risk-adverse, and would rather cancel the season than do anything creative

Hardloper wrote:

Nice idea, not gonna happen. The governing bodies are lazy and risk-adverse, and would rather cancel the season than do anything creative

Maybe at the college level, at HS the NFHS has all but said Staggered Start Cross Country is low risk. They also have had meetings and are coming up with plans on how to do it.

Hardloper wrote:

Nice idea, not gonna happen. The governing bodies are lazy and risk-adverse,

"risk-averse"

and would rather cancel the season than do anything creative

iorsco wrote:

For every York Il or Newport Beach HS coach you have 200 xc coaches who took the job for the extra $1200 salary and does not want anything to do with extra work or thinking.

Kill HS XC and let the club mentality grow. This waycoaches can work with runners who want to run and parents can send their kid to the local club that works best for their kid. Set up meets and state championships between these clubs .

these clubs would have a better shot at getting sponsors for these meets than the school athletic boards whose main focus is football.

No more having to coach kids that need a sport on their resume who quit the second after the team photo is taken or kids who treat XC as a weight loss program.

Wow, so much here. Sorry your high school XC experience wasn't good, but it's not necessary to assume almost all others have had the same experience. I've never had a kid quit after the team photo was taken. If anyone treated it as a weight loss program, they were smart enough not to tell anyone about it. I don't know any high school head coaches working for $1200 these days. Some are underpaid, to be sure, but not by that much. And, I'm not at all sure club coaches would generally make any more than high school coaches. If they did, it would mean leaving a lot of lower income kids out of the picture. I could go on...

Along with the issue of how to handle the races is the issue of how to handle the crowds. I'm not optimistic about banning all spectators. Most cross country courses have a thousand access points--there's no way to control them all. Lots of people who want to see the race are going to find ways to do it. Do you limit everyone to two guests and hope the honor system works? With any spectators allowed, how do you keep crowds from congregating at or near the finish?

Meanwhile, keep in mind that the crowds are going to be generally a lot riskier cross-section of people than the racers.

Mind you, I want a season and believe we'll have a season, but crowd control is going to be a big issue. Ultimately, it's a lot bigger issue than the races themselves. Fortunately, outdoors and spread out over at least a few thousand meters does seem to be the lowest risk of all venues, and any cross country course is better than a football stadium provided you can find a way to beat back the crush around the finish line.

Here's an interesting alternative way to organize races: https://co.milesplit.com/articles/283451-a-second-look-at-the-staggered-start

tccrochunis wrote:

Here's an interesting alternative way to organize races:

https://co.milesplit.com/articles/283451-a-second-look-at-the-staggered-start

You are trying way too hard to promote milesplit views but that is besides the point. You guys are doing it wrong. Shows your stupidity.

Okay. Not sure why you have to go down the rabbit hole of unsubstantiated non-medical advice to get to a different approach to the season, but I guess that's just you being you.

It should be possible to do some kind of racing with creative starts of some sort. I would agree with your sense of what's likely not to be too risky only a little bit: If we didn't mass start, spread out the runners in waves or staggers, limited crowds, and such the racing itself should not be all that risky to the health of the runners.

Practices would be tricky. Families of the runners would be tricky. And the likelihood that at some point whole teams will need a two-week time out would make a hash of any kind of leagues or broader competition.

But if we kept our eye on the ball of providing an outlet for some of our runners—who don't have high-risk family members—through relatively safe ways of holding the races, there'd at least be a way for the sport to be available to some. And that would be good.

Hmm. Well, to protect those at risk, you'd have to keep them from living with any teen at risk of catching and passing the virus. So that would involve dorms for all athletes. Big tax payer investment there.

Starting to look like very few schools are going back to full-time in school for high school age students, but in our state sports are still scheduled to happen, so for some of these young people, the sport will be one of the sites of catching the virus (as will their social lives, but we don't control the patterns of those or have responsibility for them).

As for the odds of an "ambulatory adult" dying...perhaps not that great, but there are plenty of cases of people having long-term negative effects when they survive. Costly to their ability to work and to their lives. When you get those effects, they are nothing like the flu. You'd be rolling the dice.

So why not create a version of cross country that provides a relatively safe opportunity for those who don't feel their families are at that much risk. It won't be perfect, but we could decrease the risk by running the races a little differently. Why wouldn't we do that?

How will these (say, California) kids get to meets?

Without bus rides (too dangerous, too close in proximity), you'd then have 4,000 cars converging on a site, for a standard meet. Not to mention the big ones.