4,082 the attendance in Eugene

Talented enough that a high school boys team would whoop them?

Uh....Eugene is not a large city, nor is it in a metropolitan area. 178K in a isolated part of the country is not metropolitan. Metropolitan areas have international airports.

Hell..Huntsville, Alabama or Virginia City or Omaha or Columbus, OH or 100 other cities are bigger and easier for people to travel to.

SMH....Eugene?

This is why our sport sucks. We place our biggest competitions in an isolated town, in a isolated state on a little college campus with limited hotels and parking. Did I mention that the weather usually sucks and the allergies.

We need to have our biggests meets and Championships in metropolitan areas. Just have it in Southern California where its easy to travel to. Plenty of hotels. Tons of other attractions and the weather is great and conducive for all events.

Eugene....SMH

Sure...instead of a Green part of Irvine, run Woodbridge in Santa Ana.

Stanford? Run it in San Francisco ..forgot Palo Alto

Run Dana Hills in Anaheim.

Mt. SAC? Forget Walnut...run it right in Los Angeles.

Etc. Etc

Let's sacrifice breathing quality for these rugged dogs so that the fans get a nice venue...because it's all about you right?

How did NYC do when hosting the pro meet at Ichan? Pretty sparse crowds if I remember correctly.

I understand the logistical challenges traveling to/from Eugene and the housing shortage, but you've missed out by never attending a big meet there. I've been to every Trials since '88 and none of them come close to Eugene '08, '12, '16, and even '21 with the last minute decision to allow spectators that kept many people at home.

I live in Eugene. It was a quiet town when I first moved here. Then the liberals called in the homeless. The Vin Lanana and the Nike thugs paid to bring the Worlds here. It will be a bust like every other track meet in the new stadium that most people that live here never wanted built - we like historic Hayward field. The new stadium will never be full of paying fans. For the Jr Worlds the ticket sales were non-existent. As a last ditch effort to fill the seats for the TV, they bussed in high schoolers.

In the past wasn't Fri night free? that may be a factor

As far as people saying it is Memorial Day weekend that is the reason for the low turnout, 99% of the years of this meet it is on Memorial Day weekend and it drew better crowds.

The vibe of the meet management has changed

One thing to point out. For a stadium that is expected to hold 10-15k. Capacity isn’t an issue for Eugene. Autzen stadium is at 54k and there are no issues on game days in and around the city on those weekends.

They need to change the track surface to concrete to make it more interesting to the general public.

Because if they trip and bleed, it's a win..

And if they cry, we've won?

Heather Dorniden, Abbey D'Agostino, etc...i mean no story here..

athlete trips and bleeds..

Wait..i hallucinated...

Um.

how about no!

have you ever seen someone trip on concrete?

The women's lacrosse final today drew a full house on Johns Hopkins Homewood campus, over 5500. Fans were in the parking lot watching as well. I know UNC travels well - six hours drive from Chapel Hill, but it shows that track and field is just not well promoted.

Wait..you're on to something here...

johns Hopkins is known for lacrosse for men already...so for women is a plus.

maybe ..just maybe the solution should be to have the Western Classic in a city or area where there's both gritty men and women.

Should we pick a UC? Or UW?

Johns Hopkins is word of mouth at this point.

Oregon is actually niche now...maybe Eugene isn't the place

Yup, how many people outside of those who post here know any of the "players" competing at Eugene? The cast of characters are fluid, most having short careers in the limelight. How does any sports fan identify with individuals that show up once or twice during the season and then are off to Europe for the summer, where the only place you hear about them is here on LRC.

How do you have meets on the same day high school and colleges have their championship meets? Do you really expect people to skip their high school state meet to come and watch some competition in Eugene or tune in on a streaming video that sometimes works and sometimes does not work? Most of your fan base is out competing and or watching their own meets.

I have been in the sport for over 55 years and I have zero interest in watching the meet out in Eugene, or for that matter, the NCAA regional meets. Pretty sad, huh? All those years first competing, then coaching, then helping out at meets and now finding that the sport isn't worth my time or interest because I don't know who is who and find little else that would interest me about the meets. (sorry for the run on sentence).

Heck, I went to a spring training game between the Mets and Braves three years ago and the stadium down in Port St. Lucie was filled to capacity, with people having a blast watching mostly non-roster guys trying to get a spot on their respective teams.

In track and field meets, we see time trials, wonder if the competitors are using PEDS and find out that some "star" attraction decided not to compete three days before the meet. We see 3-4 competitions going on at the same time, not knowing who is winning or what they jumped, threw or ran. Thank God for FinishLynx or we would still all be looking at our stop watches to figure out who ran what time.

Unfortunately, you have amateurs who run our sport, starting with high school where track and field meets can last up to 12 hours, to college where most meets do last 12 hours to the pros, where you might see a match up, but usually the top stars don't face each other. All these missteps are result of meet management that still thinks track meets are run like they were in the 1950's. I can go on and on, but then I would be no better than going to a track meet and having to spend 8-10 hours waiting for an interesting event to pop up.

That attendance number sounds like the last four digits of a credit card number.

I forget which team it is but I know one of the WNBA teams has a man playing for them.

Actually no one goes "off to Europe for the Summer" anymore. They pick and choose a few races and that's it. As a generalization you're right. It's hard to get excited about runners who rarely compete.

Winning TIme is a documentary ( based on a contemporaneous book) about the Lakers in the 80s. The poster that you responded to didn't claim that the documentary made the NBA, he only said to watch the documentary to understand what changed in the NBA to alter the trajectory of the league. Before the Bird/Johnson era the NBA was struggling.