Bound4Glory wrote:
If you want to make running more popular, how about a track meet format that's television friendly? Add up the times for the 100, 110H, 200, 400, 400H, 800, 1500, 3000. That's only about 15 minutes. Make it 35 minutes with both men and women. You can fit the entire meet in a one hour broadcast. 90 minutes with extensive commentary and commercials.
But that's not what I get when I watch the Diamond League events on NBC. You get maybe a third of the above events in 2 hours. It's like watching chess in slow motion. It sucks!
That’s something that would help make track and field more enjoyable for people that already enjoy track and field. I think we need more people invested in the sport if we really want the sport to grow. People who aren’t already interested in track aren’t going to stumble upon a condensed track meet like that on tv because most of our coverage is behind a paywall. They sure aren’t going to pay to watch something that they don’t care about.
Increasing fans of the sport isn’t going to happen by allowing alcohol and gambling at meets. That might make the sport more enjoyable for people that are already invested in the sport, but it’s not going to pull in hardly any new fans.
Same goes for drama in the sport like these guys are trying to create. It generates discussion and creates some interest among people like us that are already engaged in the sport. People who don’t care about track and field aren’t going to care about b-tier pros calling each other out.
Sure, all these little things can add up to make our sport more interesting to follow but they are only short term things we can do. To increase fans of the sport, we need to take a long term approach. Where does that start? The youth.
In America, there are so many opportunities for youth participation in soccer, basketball, baseball, and football. So many of the kids that do these sports have dreams of some kind of playing professionally. They participate in the sport as long as they can until their levels of talent leave them at a dead end and they don’t have an opportunity to advance to the next level. They almost always have some level of interest and engagement with the professional level and that usually remains even after they stop playing the sport.
The same cannot be said for track and field in America. Most kids probably don’t even know what cross country is until they are maybe 13-15 years old. We need to invest more in youth programs for track and field to introduce them to the sport at the same time they learn about all the other big sports. I think that is our best bet for increasing fans of the sport over the long haul. Of course, that will take money and volunteer time from local people all over the country.
I don’t think that is the solution by itself though. The most accessible sport for youth in America is soccer, but somehow soccer is still lagging way behind football, basketball, and baseball at the high school, collegiate, and professional levels.