Club XC Nationals

California is for medalists wrote:

It is important to understand that Mizuno HTS and Asics HTS are not considered the same club. In order to be the same club you MUST have your sponsor drop their name from your club or must all be covered under the same sponsor like Asics Aggies or Hansons-Brooks.

All well and good, but there weren't enough [insert shoe brand here] HTS entrants in any race to score as a team so at least for this meet the club naming doesn't affect their consideration as a scoring unit. So it makes sense for the individuals with gear sponsors to retain the sponsor name in their entry and results listing so they get credit for having competed in a national championship, possibly netting them a bonus of sorts. Going forward, should they be in a position to field teams to place in events like this one, they will want to reconcile this loose end. What seems somewhat odd is that they were able to enter using those different club names even though the name registered with USATF is, well, simply "Hudson Training Systems at Boulder Center for Sports Medicine". Not sure why USATF meet officials would permit bastardization of a club name for entries, given their reputation for being hardasses about uniform regulations and other nitpicky crap.

So what is the waiting period for switching clubs within the same asociation. Because Asics HTS is not the same as HTS so running under HTS would require a change in clubs next time around. Those are the rules.

Asics HTS is not a club name registered under USATF, neither is Mizuno HTS. See for yourself: http://www.usatf.org/clubs/search/info.asp?associationNumber=32 This is why I found it odd that meet officials allowed its use.

Here is the source of your confusion... USATF is using a new meet registration system. Athletes who have both a "Club" affiliation (HTS) and a "sponsor" affiliation (Asics, Nike, etc) now have the option of registering for the meet as Unattached, Club Name only, Sponsor Name only, or Club name/Sponsor name.

In the past, when a team registered their athletes for a cross country meet, it would automatically register them as "Club name only." Now you have to individually select the proper affiliation for each athlete, which isn't always going to default to the correct thing.

The way the computer system is set up, if I have 4 athletes signed up as "Club NW", and one as "Club NW/Brooks", they're not going to show up as being on the same team, and I assume that if I want them all to score I need them to all show up under the same name. Mike Scott and I chatted briefly about this in DAB, it's just one of the many annoying "features" of the new system that has been causing problems.

So from USATF's point of view, HTS is the only club they recognize, the rest are individual sponsors, and it's basically a bug in the system that is causing them to show up as separate teams.

I think if HTS actually had enough athletes for a team that they would have had to make their affiliations all match (HTS only), but since they didn't, it didn't matter.

It is also confusing because many clubs do have a sponsor name as part of their team name, like Hansons-Brooks, but that's not what the issue was with HTS.

Clear as mud?

polevaultpower wrote:

I think if HTS actually had enough athletes for a team that they would have had to make their affiliations all match (HTS only), but since they didn't, it didn't matter.

Sort of what I'd figured, yeah.