Should slow kids be kicked of high school cross country teams ?

We warm up? Not understanding the question?

Warmups. As in a jacket and pants.

Did you read any of the posts? It costs money. It takes time away from the better runners. It is a safety issue to have 100 kids running around around town. It is a huge issue when tracknrolls around. One school in my area keeps about 100 boys and 100 girls on the XC but they cut down to 50 in track in order to keep total rosters to 100 each. 300 kids using a track is dangerous.

I dontthink may of you understand the mental side of the sport. We have a lot of indoor meetings to go over strategy. We have meet recaps. We spend a great deal of time one on one with the top 10 runners.

I work with a very slow XC team (even the varsity would be considered JV anywhere else). I don't mind the ones that come there to run, participate, and improve. It's exciting to see them get better and build confidence no matter how slow they are. Some of my favorites to watch get better. However, the majority of our slower kids are the whiniest and unmotivated ones around. I don't understand why they even join a sport they clearly despise. I think for athletes like this they should have Run/Fitness clubs. XC and track should have requirements, for one you should be able to run a 5k distance for XC since that's the actual sport. It's embarrassing half our team is walking on the course. Also show up to practice! Now days they can come and go as they please and no wonder they don't improve when you run 2 days a week.

No I would not kick anyone off the team, If the Workouts are too hard they will quit, but try to keep them on the team as long as they are working hard and trying to improve, High School Teams are also Social, Making Friends Kids Learning to be reliable (Go To every Practice on time ready to work hard to improve) Work Ethic, Reliability, Discipline Actually seeing the results of the work with improved times throughout the season, To Me people are more important than Money, Also ALMOST NEVER Talked about it seems Running attracts a lot of Introverted people who lack social skills and without a team they feel of no Important are loners, If you think about it it is not good to have a lot of people who have no social skills and see themselves as not important which will make many angry, Now I am not saying that will happen all the time it will be the exception but no one should be alienated EVER, Besides USA Has Money to burn, I hear we are going to give Ukraine a Country 90% of High Schoolers would not know where it was, it's History or anything else Until Usyk and Lomachenko Became household names with their Boxing Who else I know many great Athletes are from There Like Pole Vaulter S. Bubka and Women's 800 great N. Olizarenko but everyone thinks of them as being Soviet Union even though they are from Ukraine as they competed for Soviet Union

Yeah keep the kids on the teams

i note the bait and switch there. you claim it costs money but we discussed how that's not really true. you then say "it takes time away" from the better runners. i thought the OP was saying it cost the better runners funding. it doesn't. but you're mixing and matching parts that then no longer add up to the whole. costing time is not the same as costing funding.

re "costing time," sorry, i would think that happens at some bulk level and not with any specific athlete. like the coach saying 75 is unwieldy. to be clear, that's not saying #76 sucks too bad to take part, that's saying regardless of quality we're drawing a line for practical reasons. that is different than what the OP is saying, where he would be obligated to coach perhaps only 10 runners judged good enough by a high standard, or 30 seen as sufficiently mediocre, or perhaps 80 if they all deserved it but not the slacker 81.

i think people are responding to this at face value. i don't buy it for the reasons i just explained, that a team with standards would have to accept all meeting them which might mean plenty and not fewer. i think this is really a prima donna who should coach junior olympians privately -- not schools -- and who thinks the school version of the sport should be designed for few runners above a relatively high standard with the funds saved reassigned to benefit those few survivors. this line of thought has been dismantled already on this thread.

where i came from we had track/XC period which was usually some of the varsity people plus those who had ambitions. then we had after school practice for the full team at all the different levels. so you could do your monday recap in track period. we also exist in the internet age where people can be emailed or zoomed and don't actually have to all be co-located to watch video and receive feedback and teaching.

re absolute numbers of people, isn't a typical TF team LJ/TJ go off to their area, HJ off to theirs, vaulters to theirs, throwers head off to the circles, sprinters one part of the track or maybe run windsprints on the field, hurdlers another, distance guys maybe track or maybe run the complex. use of the track might be staggered. some athletes might do some/all of their workout during the athletics class period. the idea the 800 guys might be tripping over shot putters also doing a track workout is no reality i experienced. be real, a TF practice isn't 100 people running laps same time.

and you're saying you're a coach?

No. It is the same. It would be great to keep all of the kids and be able to provide adequate attention. That would require hiring another coach.

A 200 person track team has 150 kids running. I experience it everyday in the spring. We all try to work together but it is dangerous. We have had boys run into girls working on hurdles. We had a male distance coach go to the hospital a few years ago after being run over by a female sprinter.

likewise, for XC we'd run a warm up and strides together and cool down after, but in between be split up by varsity/JV/frosh teams tasked to do the meat of the workouts separately. i get at some HUGE number it would be too much. it's not usually one big moshpit of people though. being an XC team we can run the campus, in the building, the track, or off campus. it can be many people but it's a huge campus. the problems are more supervisory and making sure workouts are effective than space.

7/10

You got a lot of bites on this