THE END of college Track & Field and Cross Country...

cu trackfan wrote:Where will we hold the club track meets? At high school venues???? Our state T&F championship is held at a DII university because the only DI university in the state has a crappy track and not enough seats. The DI schoolhas been scheduled to host the Big Ten outdoor championship but has had to defer due to inadequate facility. Not sure what this ruling means for a new T&F venue there.....

That is unfortunate where you live has so few tracks but what does that have to do with anything? If it is already a problem to begin with in your area, how would the club system make that problem worse?

An expanded club system won't make any of this worse but it won't make it better. Clubs don't have tracks. Boston, for example, has arguably the best running club scene in the country but all of the clubs need high schools or colleges with tracks when they want to train on one. Out of school runners there have plenty of opportunities to race on the track but the races are virtually all at college tracks (BU, Harvard, Bentley, the one exception is the Reggie Lewis Center and few other places have a comparable facility.)

If college track and cross country die, and I think it will change but not die, none of those facilities will likely be available for long. Why would a school spend money maintaining a track if it has no track team? Clubs could relocate and use high school tracks but generally they are inferior to college ones.

For a club system to replace the university one the clubs would need tons of money to build their own facilities and to transport their athletes to high level competitions all over the country. No way that happens.

HRE wrote:For a club system to replace the university one the clubs would need tons of money to build their own facilities and to transport their athletes to high level competitions all over the country. No way that happens.

I guess the South is a bit different than the north. Around here it is very common for local parks and high schools to have well maintained tracks. Just here in New Orleans there are at least 6 public tracks that have all been recently built or updated plus a stadium that holds plenty of track events that can hold up to 30k. Two local high schools have new mondo tracks. I know in Texas there are lots of very nice track facilities for local high schools, some better than plenty of college facilities.

I think one of the problems is that people are assuming that others need to foot the bill for the athletes. Unfortunately our sport is one where full time athletes are uncommon and really the sport is driven by people who work full time and run because they love it. I don't see why embracing that is a bad thing. Our high school doesn't have a big budget, maybe 2-3k a year for XC/Indoor/Outdoor track but because the team fundraises or helps pay their own way to big meet, we compete out of state 6-7 times a year including New Balance Indoor and Outdoor Nationals (this doesn't include summer track either). It is possible for it to work, but of course athletes would need to be running for the love of running, not because a scholarship is associated with it. And I know plenty of good coaches who wouldn't try to make a living off of coaching, they coach well already and work full time as it is.

Why Not like the System in Japan where Local companies sponser Teams and atheletes. Would be much better and has the potential to generate Money for everyone. TF Teams Could be organised like Minor League Baseball Teams ... More Local rivalry Could be estabblished with more Fan interest

I think this could be a positive development for Collegiate T&F. All that's happened is that they're about to make explicit what was only implicit before: Only those schools in the big 5 have any chance of winning the BCS. Boise State found out the hard way that success in competition was not enough.

Now that it's clear that schools outside the power 5 can't win the national championship, fan support and donor dollars will decrease. Once that happens, it will become clear that football is a big money sink. These schools will re-distribute resources to other sports - maybe not T&F since it is expensive - but certainly XC which is not. Other minor sports will benefit as well, especially because, with football out of the picture, the impact of Title IX on other men's sport will be lessened. This doesn't even take into account the coming rash of lawsuits generated by all the concussions.

Runners can still compete and fund themselves.

There are some high schools around here with good tracks but they're sort of exceptional and only one that I know of could host a steeplechase. But even with access to a good high school track a club is only going to have access to it during off hours, i.e., when the high school team isn't using it.

And it's likely that a college aged club runner will likely be in college even if the school has no cross country or track program and it's unlikely that the high school track his club is using is just a warm up jog from campus. So there will often be an issue of getting to that track. Sure, it could work and for some guys it might be a better option but I think you'd find that a lot of people who would have continued to run while in college will just let it go because of logistics.

It seems that more and more college aged athletes from countries that do have well developed club systems are coming here because both the academic and athletic opportunities are better here so losing the college level sport won't be a good thing overall.

I guess some Seattle company is compensating NCAA athletes now? http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/2109226

Since joining the Mountain West Conference, I believe BSU has yet to win an outright football title. They're not the power everyone thinks they are. They trailed Oregon State 30-6 at halftime of their bowl game last year. OSU took their foot off the pedal in the 2nd half and still won big.

BSU's football stadium holds 37K and they're not filling it.

I agree with you that the club system will be hard to develop here, but I just don't think the splitting off the big football schools will end track and cross country in colleges and universities as a whole.

I worked at a couple of D-1 schools with big, but not very good football programs. Sure, football brought in money, but it wasn't distributed to the other sports. The money stayed with the football program. It might have resulted in better overall facilities for all athletes, and in a bigger women's x-c team for Title IX "cover" but for the men, nothing.

Plus having football does put a lot of Title IX pressure on the so called "minor" men's sports--leading to elimination "because of Title IX" when in fact its because of the football teams (Delaware, Maryland, etc.)

Presently I work at a D-II school with no football. Men's and women's track and cross country are healthy, successful programs. There still are some Title IX issues--men's track doesn't have as large a traveling team as women-- but generally the athletes are satisfied.

Actually what I'm hoping is that losing the big teams to the semi-pro ranks will not cause the end of college sports as a whole, but instead the drastic de-emphasis of football at smaller D-1 schools who are being shut out of the big money.

Football is expensive, it causes brain damage, and the players it recruits don't really want to be in school.

Sports in which participants are doing it because they enjoy it and not because of the money involved have great educational value and actually complement what goes on in the classroom.

I think you're right on the mark or at least awfully close to it.

Hey, once they get paid they should be paying tuition, room

board like anybody else!

Wondering in the West wrote:

Since joining the Mountain West Conference, I believe BSU has yet to win an outright football title. They're not the power everyone thinks they are. They trailed Oregon State 30-6 at halftime of their bowl game last year. OSU took their foot off the pedal in the 2nd half and still won big.

BSU's football stadium holds 37K and they're not filling it.

True.

2011 they finished second (6-1) to TCU (7-0), who is now a middling team in the Big 12.

2012 they finished as Co-Champions with Fresno State and San Diego State (all of them 7-1).

2013 was a down year and an expanded conference (WAC and MWC essentially merged), and Boise State finished second in their division at 6-2 behind Utah State (7-1).

That said, they have still been a college power on par with the Power 5 programs: in the Petersen era, they went 1-0 against the ACC (33-30 over VT in 2010); 2-2 vs. the Big-12 with scores totaling 111-105; 0-1 vs. the Big Ten with scores of 13-17; 8-3 against the Pac-12 with scores 320-234; 1-0 vs. the SEC with scores 35-21; 1-1 vs. BYU scoring 27-43. Virtually all of those games were bowl games or games against bowl-bound teams... during the Petersen era, if his team was in a Power 5 conference, they would probably be a 6-8 win team almost every year. Not a usual Top-10 team, but would crack the Top 25 in "up" years and go bowling even in almost any "down" year.

vpathletics.com wrote:

cu trackfan wrote:Where will we hold the club track meets? At high school venues???? Our state T&F championship is held at a DII university because the only DI university in the state has a crappy track and not enough seats. The DI schoolhas been scheduled to host the Big Ten outdoor championship but has had to defer due to inadequate facility. Not sure what this ruling means for a new T&F venue there.....

That is unfortunate where you live has so few tracks but what does that have to do with anything? If it is already a problem to begin with in your area, how would the club system make that problem worse?

What it has to do is that clubs cant fund T&F venues good enough for their best athletes to compete at. Even junior olympics are usually contested at college tracks.

Since the NCAA has now voted in agreement to the "Super 5" proposals is it panic over?

Does this mean that thanks to Title IX there will be "total cost of attendance” scholarships available to female athletes attending Super 5 conference universities?

Anyone who thinks this will change anything is ridiculous. The NCAA is NOT going away. The power 5 will NOT break off or form their own division. Rules may change at the top level but that's it. Who really wants to break off of the NCAA? If the power 5 coaches get their rule changes, they'll shut up. This will all blow over.

Athletes getting paid is bad and i will tell you why. 1. All this talk of paying college athletes and how much money they bring the school is presented in the form of the poor athlete who is barely getting by. this is a lie. These BIG 5 athletes in the major sports are celebrities on campus with full athletic scholarship. Most people would pay to be these kids. 2. when they talk about paying players they mean football and basketball only. They are not, i repeat they are not going to pay non revenue sport athletes to compete. 3. Math. lets take texas for example. If they bring in the same amount of money but up their expenses due to player salaries then the money will not be available for budgets, scholarship, and coaching salaries of other sports. They sports will be cut. 4. Although i think that this will make the mid major D1's and D2 much better competitively in our sport it will reduce opportunity. It is a domino effect. If the best kids cant go to oregon they are going to go to some mid major or D2. This means that the kids at the lower mid majors or D2's that could have been on those teams will now be SOL. 5. student debt in our sport will increase. A lot of the mid major D1's and D2 schools will have access to better kids but that does not mean that they will have access to more money for scholarships and budget. 6. The last part of the equation is the loss of revenue for the NCAA. If the big5 blow everything up what happens to events like march madness. March madness is what pays for the National Championships of almost every non revenue sport. All those D1, D2, and D3 kids who get to go across the country and compete at nationals and the NCAA pays for the travel cost will be gone. They will either have to lower the number of student athletes that can qualify or pass the cost to the schools which will result in more cutting of programs. The NAIA may end up being a non revenue sport powerhouse. Cheers

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHALOLOLOLOLOL

Nobody here has any idea how this whole thing works. Do you have any idea how much money this new college football playoff system is making? New TV deals are bringing in HUGE amounts of money. Trust me. Nothing in terms of funding will change. If so, it will be miniscule. You are worrying about nothing.

it doesnt matter what the TV deals are Track and Cross are not included in the equation.