When I went to college in early 70's, anyone could walk on to XC team....What happened?

I’ve heard of Dellinger taking 5:00-4:40 walkons but mid major d1 schools these days can’t dare to take those types

What happened? The passage of Title IX in 1972 and the rise of college football limited available roster spots for male XC athletes.

College XC and track is governed by the same lazy elitism and talent worshipping as everything else. The organization will only be comprised of special talent with the appropriate pedigree and no others shall be considered. The coach really doesn't want to develop raw talent and his recruiting chops would be called into question if his blue chip high school talent was outperformed by a walk on. It's super embarrassing if your full ride talent is always injured/not progressing/mentally weak but that hard working walk on that played high school soccer just won the conference 1500m. title.

How about the teams that give every scholarship to a foreign runner? What sense does that make? Let’s pay an international runner to run for us????

Your perception changed. Arkansas, Wisconsin, Oregon, Stanford, and other top programs did not allow anyone the teams. Most D3 teams still allow anyone to walkon.

There’s roster limits for the men. A lot of coaches will still post workouts and fringe runners can typically train with the club program. But there is typically a time trial in the fall and you have to make the top ten or so to be officially rostered. At least that’s how it was for me back in the nineties. We had a couple guys miss the cut that eventually made the roster the next year. You have to love it to stick with it. But it’s a D1 program, there are no participation trophies (although guys would get a t-shirt for the camp that preceded the time trial).

I was a walk-on in the early 00s. I sucked. Not much to say. But I showed up every day and I kept at it and now I could probably compete with the leaders from back then now in my late 30s. Grateful for the experience.

Do women get cut from XC? Maybe at the hardcore D1 XC powerhouses, but probably nowhere else.

it's title 9 stupidity.

really disappointing.

I walked on to a men's college XC team in 1986 that was top 10 at NCAA D1 nationals. I was a 10:20 two miler at that point. Was a little faster than that in HS.

But yeah no problems. Coach didn't seem to mind me being there and I did all the training. Even made a travel team. I wasn't the slowest.

Title 9 enforcement hurts so many men - really needs a major rethink and a new safe harbor standard.

Coaches pay for runner's to run for their university. What don't people understand? In the G5 and P5 and at the best mid majors coaches are trying to win. No where in a coaches contract does it say they are an Olympic Development Coach, or that they are evaluated on the improvement of in-state athletes (or the improvement of any athlete for that matter). On the contrary, most coaches at the best schools earn bonuses and salary increases for conference championships, All-Americans, National placement, etc...

It feels good to develop a local guy into an all-conference competitor, but in a 12 to 14 team league things are cut throat. More often than not the 22 year old Kenyan who ran 14:25 in camp is going to pull down more points long term than American who ran 4:11 in HS.

The best teams, are typically pulling in great talent both foreign and domestic, and developing that talent.

Viking21 wrote:

What happened? The passage of Title IX in 1972 and the rise of college football limited available roster spots for male XC athletes.

Yep, this. Title IX has done more to harm men's sports and limit men's opportunities than it has to help women's sports.

Old and slow wrote:

Viking21 wrote:

What happened? The passage of Title IX in 1972 and the rise of college football limited available roster spots for male XC athletes.

Yep, this. Title IX has done more to harm men's sports and limit men's opportunities than it has to help women's sports.

This is what I've heard from talking to current coaches. There were a few years back, maybe still are, a handful of places that had no roster limits but they were rare and none were at schools that had a football team. Title IX has forced many male sports to limit their rosters and that was not the case in the early 70s when I was in school. We'd run an occasional meet at Penn State and they'd have maybe 30-40 guys in their teams. It would be almost impossible to do something like that now unless they dropped another men's sport.

Lazy and incompetent coaches. I started running with Mihaly Igloi in the summer of 1967 after my junior year in high school. I was a 4:56 miler running under a legendary coach. He wasn’t doing me any favors, he would coach anyone if you did the work. A year later as a senior I improved to 4:23 mile and 9:27 2 mile. By the age of 19 improved to 4:15, 9:07, and a 14:04 3 mile.

In 19 years as a college coach I always welcomed walk-ons. How could I not?

In 2009 my oldest son was looking at colleges and was planning to run when he got there. One of the places we looked was LaSalle where Charles Torpey was coaching. He told us that anyone was welcome to run for him they were willing to do the work. He said, "If a kid who never broke 13:00 for 2 miles in high school wants to run here and does the work I will coach him and find places for him to race." LaSalle was not the right school for my son but I would have liked to have Torpey coaching him. That comment made me a fan.

On the other hand not all coaches have the ability to take anyone who wants to run. I have a nephew who was a low 11:00 two mile guy in high school who got into Brown and wanted to run but didn't know if he'd be able to. Bob Rotheburg was coaching there at the time and I'd coached with Bob briefly when he was a high school coach. Bob was far from lazy or incompetent. I called him to ask what the chances of my nephew being on the team were and Bob told me there was essentially no chance at all. Brown was under severe Title IX restrictions and he could not keep more than 20, maybe 22 , men on his team. He said he really regretted that, in most of his time there he let anyone into the team who wanted to run but just couldn't do that anymore. The nephew actually ended up at Tufts where he did run for a while.

You are correct HRE, forgot about the roster size limitations. Those were not an issue when I was coaching. There is still an elitist attitude that governs many programs, however,

35+ years ago I was a jog on runner for a D3 school known more for its academics than running.

The XC coach saw me running around campus during freshman orientation week and asked me to run, but I wasn't interested at the time. Got cut by the basketball team that fall, and ran track in the spring and then ended up for 3 years on the cross country team. Scored all conference in track, but not XC. At half way I wanted to transfer to a D1 school and walk on and would have been a marginal runner (33 min 10K at the time).

An ex teammate did walk on to a top 5 team and scored some points for them along the way (did not run nationals). At that school you were expected to be 9:30 or faster for 3200, low or sub 15 for 5K. He was pretty frustrated there after about 2 years and quit.

My son was easily D3 level at about any school (sub 10, low 16 XC 5K), but did get a total snub from one of the better programs. I was kind of surprised. The coach wouldn't even talk to him on the phone and only sent a terse email, forwarding the admission's office email. We visited the campus with a couple of his teammates and the students seemed like total snobs--smirking at us. So he nor his friends (sub 9:30 in high school) didn't even bother to apply there.

It really is a shame. Walking on back in 1990 really did change my life.

The lessons on goal setting, long term planning, discipline and delayed gratification that I learned as part of that team took me a long way in my academic, and later my professional, life. Had I not learned those lessons through track, who knows where I would be today?

I did not run at all in high school and went to a a academically good D3 state school. When I got there, I went to the track coach's office and said "Hey, I am short and thin and some guys from my neighborhood think I have some talent to run, can I join the team?" He told me to go get a physical at the campus health center and then sent me down to the distance coach.

And it paid off for the coach too. I was second man on our (admittedly poor) cross country team in the first meet of the season and became a core part of a team that went on to finish 3rd at "baby nats" twice, was a 2 time D3 All American and left campus having set school records in the steeple, 5000m and 10,000m. The steeple record was broken by a teammate before I left, but the 10,000m time stood for something like 5-6 years, and the 5000m time stood for 20 years, even though the school was D1 within just a few years after I left.

Ghost of Igloi wrote:

You are correct HRE, forgot about the roster size limitations. Those were not an issue when I was coaching. There is still an elitist attitude that governs many programs, however,

Definitely. I also recall seeing a comment from some coach who I knew pretty well but won't name to the effect that he really couldn't be bothered coaching someone that was not going to help him win their conference or get to Nationals.