It's amazing to me how bad bad D3 track is

Or they want a liberal arts college. Williams and Amherst, for example

There is a HUGE range from the highly-competitive top echelon of Division III to the more participatory, almost club-level at the bottom.

Side note:

I was interviewing for a Division III coaching job many years ago, having had some successful at the high school level. They asked how I would handle the step up to the college ranks, working with better athletes and challenging them (however they worded it).

The fact was that my high school teams (particularly the girls) would have drilled that college. It wouldn't have been close. My girls would have 15-pointed them in a dual meet.

Being young and stupid, I answered too honestly and talked about what we could do to bring the college teams up to the level of my high schoolers. (And I did mention that based on best times in the 1600 and 3200, the high schoolers were clearly much faster).

I did not get that job.

HA! Live and learn.

Alex Philip ran 13:52 without significant competition at D3 nationals. You’re claiming that the winner of D1 would have lapped a 13:52 guy at the national champs? That’s possible indoors, I guess (meaning he was 200m behind the leader). Once he got in with better competition his PRs improved and he was a D1 All-American in the 10k.

Why are you “shocked”? D3 is supposed to be slower than D1. If you’re a top distance runner in HS, you want to go D1. NCAA DIII typically are small schools (1,000 - 3,000 enrollment) with excellent academics and they don’t have the facilities and athletic emphasis to compete with DI. That’s precisely why they have different divisions in the NCAA, so the smaller schools compete against each other and not against universities with 20,000 to 50,000 students.

But then you have cheater schools like 51k student NYU that should be D1.

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D1 vs DIII

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"D1 and DIII are the same bc there are a few good DIII runners"

Having friends that coaches in both of the conferences mentioned, I know a bit more about the details of each situation. Each conference is seriously handicapped by roster limits, scholarship limits (if they have any at all), lack of coaching, and lack of travel funding, and lack of facilities.

UMass (an A-10 program that takes a lot of crap on these boards) is one of the best overall athletically funded programs in the A-10 ($41mil+ in fiscal year 2022)....but they have literally no $$$ for men's track because it is all going to horrid football, mid-level basketball, decent ice hockey, and lacrosse. It wasn't that long ago that they cut their men's indoor program!

In more ways than not, each of these conferences NEC and A-10 (and their results listed), resembles D3. Apples to apples.

you have revenue and non-revenue sports confused saying no reason to choose D3. a football player can get one of 85 fulls and never leave the bench. ditto hoops has 15 fulls, 5 start, maybe 10 or so are in the rotation. you can balance a full scholarship against school quality or how much you play.

but TF and XC are on very limited scholarships, mostly doled out to people able to score D1 conference points and/or compete at nationals. most of the team is on a small, almost ceremonial partial or are walkons.

unlike football, where the 3rd or even 4th string middle LB might be on a full, and might like his choice for that alone, the 25th guy on a 25 man XC team, who barely gets meets, then maybe finishes 58/65 battling with lower divisions in the slower heats, or towards the back of a D1 cross meet, while paying his way, is really deciding whether they want that prestige and potential access to better coaching to fix their weakness, or would rather pay their way just the same in D3 and be much more competitive in that context. same runner, same times. the D1 walkons i ran against are paying for their school just like me. they are finishing back with me in the finish order. so a lot of it boils down to the ability to say, "i was D1" even if in a meet someone like me from D3 is indistinguishable.

that and you seem to be saying that's true even if the coach thinks so little they get maybe 2 cross meets with the B team and a couple home track meets, per year. you train year round, hard, then basically play the equivalent of soccer garbage time.

i also think what you're struggling with is how much the d3 school would fund a track program if it consisted of just the handful of us who could have gone back end of D1. it's kind of like the snobs on here who think XC teams should have strenuous standards even if they can barely run out 5-7 kids to fill a varsity. to me it's a sign of a healthy program if 20+ kids per gender show up from a 1000 kid school even if some are slow.

I agree with you. His PR was 13:52 as a D3 guy. He would have gotten lapped indoor by D2 guys. He then improved in D1 just like people keep saying. D1 is far superior.

My point precisely. My further point was that its more embarrassing to be performing at those levels (or god forbid, even worse, the person who ISN’T scoring in these atrocious meets!) and identifying as a D1 athlete. That’s like getting an olympic tattoo and you’re the person carrying peoples sweats to the finish line.

I'm sorry, but this really seems like carefully cultivated "click bait" to me.

You can't just cherry-pick the worst results from a single NCAA D3 conference meet and utilize that as a broad commentary on all D3 track athletes.

I was a very mediocre D3 distance runner with a 5,000m PR of 16:36, and I didn't come close to scoring at our conference meet.

BTW, spoiler alert: D3 schools do not give out athletic scholarships!

The bottom line is that the OP really needs to do quite a bit more homework.

You have not done your homework. D3 is so muchbworse than D1.

I said multiple times that I'm aware this is bad D3 and that I was scraping the bottom of the barrel. The bottom of the barrel just happens to be much lower than I expected. I saw that MVSU was playing the Mississippi Women's University team in men's basketball, and then went down a rabbit hole seeing what kind of distance runners they had. I saw some really slow cross country times, but I figured I better look at track since I didn't know what the cross country courses were like, and that 21 something guy was 8th place in the most recent conference meet. I said "bad D3" in the original post, so I'm kind of surprised people think that I think this is average D3.

since you're revising it to how bad that bad track can be, that conference, it's the tiny schools, maybe 3 or so have their own campus track, the others have to go off campus and how consistently does that get done, a few with tepid schedules, 2-3 indoor, 2-3 outdoor, like fewer meets total than many schools do for a single phase. principia has facilities but only wants christian scientists. bunch of no-name schools.

it's kind of like when i figured out skyline/cunyac seemed to have lousy soccer and you think about it 5 seconds and it's like where do they even practice and how easy is it to get there for poor students in metro NYC. that's a little different than a soccer field a short walk across campus or maybe even situated in the dorm complex. i can't make fun of folks who don't have my setup.

i mean, it dawned on me at a point the reason the lowest division kids in HS at tiny schools are so much slower is.....they've got maybe 2-3 meets before their state progression and have barely seen a track.

We were a regular podium team in D3 xc and t&f in the late 90s/early 2000s. Team composed of all kids from small town in-state high schools (<80 in graduating classes, probably as low as 20) who never got DI looks. Coach specifically took us to meets like Cowboy Jamboree and Stanford so he could rattle off & take pride in all the DI teams we beat at our Monday PM weekly meeting after a race. Our top 8-9 guys all would've been scoring runners for teams in the top half of the Pac10, Big12, etc

Vassar has had outdoor track for well over a decade, probably longer, but only started an official varsity NCAA team for indoors two years ago. People still sometimes ran a few indoor meets as unattached athletes, though.

It's been a while since a D3 is bad thread has popped up, it's always good to be reminded of how fragile people's egos can be.