No respect for Dave Smith and Oklahoma State men’s cross country team

No dog in the fight but you are missing a more obvious point.

Ok please explain then so we can move past semantics and focus on the central thesis of this thread. No wonder you slow pedants on here can’t get laid hahaha.

Pack up your xenophobia and slither away.

I have never heard anything positive about Smith. My cousin was one of his athletes and said that Smith routinely ignored injuries, refused to hear complaints, and blamed athletes for losses. Apparently most of the athletes left one year and Smith tried to slow down or block their transfers.

There are similar stories among A LOT of top coaches. There’s a reason why their programs are run so successfully, they have to be the bad guys sometimes.

I know several bad stories about Mike smith, something most people here don’t expect because they’re in awe of him. There are countless bad stories about mark wetmore, miltenburg, vin lananna, etc etc. I hated my college coach, yet he is constantly praised by fellow alumni who happened to just hit it off with him.

The reality is that these coaches are old enough and mature to not care about what people on letsrun say. They don’t care. You’re not their athletes. You don’t provide value to them. You’re not all high and mighty, you’re tearing down a cross country coach who’s made 2-3 million in earnings from his position, something MOST coaches at his level can’t even get close to.

He’s had a lot of success with home-grown talent. Rodriguez, Sinclaire Johnson, Josh Thompson, Kayla Edwards, Taylor Roe. Stitt and the Smeeton honorable mentions in recent years.

This year, the foreign recruiting has been conspicuous. However, it’s very hard to recruit the top Americans - it’s Midwest and not at altitude. Not a fair or even playing field at all. They all go Colorado or NAU etc, as it’s a huge advantage - we all know it. For academics, Americans will choose Ivy. So, the man is playing the cards he’s been given. It’s not an Alabama programme which is basically solely reliant on Africans - it’s never been that…plenty of homegrown talent is developed, but the truth is he gets scalped badly on American recruiting m.

If you think it is bad that he stocks his teams with foreign student athletes just take a look at Men's and Women's Golf & Tennis teams. Most are flooded with foreign student athletes. Some have no Americans on them at all. He's gotta be one kind of a salesman to get these kids to come to a place like the state of Oklahoma.

I get your point but I will also nitpick that Rodriguez is the only one there from Oklahoma. Being a public state (of Oklahoma) university, he'd be the only one "home-grown" from that list. Oklahoma isn't a large or deep enough state for all the talent to fill one high-level D1 school; it's not even deep enough for distance to put many runners into any of the 4 D1 schools in the state.

I'm neither a Dave fan nor a Dave hater, but plenty are (haters) and he's not for every athlete. The last local talent he signed was Cheyenne Walden and she left with a pretty poor opinion of the place after her freshman year (not unlike Natalie Cook).

At this point, if we're looking outside of Oklahoma for talent, it doesn't matter much if Dave's getting them from Irving Texas or Iten or Flower Mound or Morocco.

Actually - I should give credit to Cayden Dawson and Payton Hinkle and ; forgot about them when I wrote the above.

I was thinking the South and Midwest, not just Oklahoma would qualify. I think he’s recruited and developed reasonably well from Texas nearby (eg. Flower Mound). Kinda counts as ‘local’ in my book - Texas is next door; it’s not Morrocco or Iten!
I agree with your comment below on the women’s side particularly - some of the local Oklahoma girls have run impressively and he’s done extremely well there too. So have they - They’re in the top traveling team of one of the best schools in the country; they 100% would not have been on any coaches radar (at any major D1) coming out of high school. They came from nowhere really and so have done a fantastic job. No altitude boost either. Good on them! He’s doing okay considering the difficulty of recruiting Americans. No way is a Burns or Birnbaum going to Ok State, let’s face it.

OSU is not AAU, so not a national research university, a regional research university, at best.

The current successful Oklahoma talent he signed weren't overly competitive nationally, but they were the top of the heap here in Oklahoma. Though to be fair, most OK high school programs run fairly low mileage (from my talks with a couple of coaches and runners) which allows a lot of potential development at the next level if they put in the work (and can be convinced to put in the work). I think Dave has been around here long enough to know that, and knows that about any incoming freshman from OK schools; but that knowledge doesn't always get to other coaches who compare the top OK times to kids from other states putting in 70+ mile weeks their 10-12th grade years).

Similarly, I'm not 100% bought into the narrative of Dave ruining German, but there is a bit of truth in the idea that his style of training will make you if it doesn't break you. Which is why Cheyenne left and why Natalie signing there in the first place never made much sense (I only assume it was because Stillwater was close to home). You are probably right that I shouldn't be too picky about what "local" means, as there's not too big a sample of kids in a state of under 4mil that will sign up for that type of work load.

I personally still don't mind the international athletes too much, since he is also signing and developing other "local" (in quotes because, see above) talent.

Nice insights from OK, thanks. Cook actually did extremely well until injured. Like you, I wouldn’t lay any blame there either - never seemed a good fit.
I totally agree with everything you say re the Internationals. I think he’s done very well with promoting as many ‘locals’ as possible. It’s a very uneven recruiting playing field and no altitude.. most coaches would have flopped magnificently with the issues he’s faced.
It’ll never happen, but indulge me here in a little ‘thought experiment’: what would happen if OK State’s Dave Smith and NAU’s Mike Smith actually swapped places for a few years? Do we really think Mike Smith would smash it at OK State? Personally, I don’t. I think he’s struggle without the altitude and getting a huge slice of the top American recruits.

Nobody complained when Mike Smith was winning with mostly international athletes. Lomong, Grijalva, Kusche, Baxter, Quax, Beamish, etc.

Mike Smith didn't build the NAU dynasty, he inherited it. I have more respect for Dave Smith because he built his dynasty from the ground up, without altitude training.

Mike Smith could do zero recruiting and still have America's best athletes BEGGING to join the team simply because the location of the school in the best altitude training city in North America.

First of all Lamong left NAU in 2007. Mike Smith got to NAU a decade later lol. Grijalva came to the US as a one year old baby Sonia he really considered an international import?? Dave Smith has more internationals on his team this year than Mike Smith has had in his entire tenure at NAU. Not really comparable.

Peter Lomong.

So it's ok to recruit a foreign citizen but only if he/she already lives in America (without American Citizenship)?

But for a foreign citizen who desires to live in America but could not move there in high school, in your opinion it is unethical for Dave Smith to give that athlete an opportunity in America?

WTF the mental gymnastics you NAU fanboys go through just to insult the coach that threatens your dynasty. At least the OK State fans have class and don't make low blows against their opponents or their coaches.

Hasn’t NAU had a Guatemalan, a couple Kiwis, probably other non U.S. runners?

AAU is not the conclusive list of research universities, especially when you consider may have voluntarily withdrawn due to their onerous (almost country club-esque) membership criteria. Carnegie Classification - probably just the R1; the R2 still has some very good schools but with more limited areas of research specialty - would be a much better categorization of a "national research university."

I'm not sure I would go so far to call OK State "world class" on the whole; it's a land grand college with an agricultural, rural medicine, and cooperative missions that serves a different purpose than many strict flagship universities do. They run an urban community college (in OKC), medical college (in Tulsa), a separate hospital (also in Tulsa), and a vocational college at different campuses across the state. But it's still a highly active research university with some very good programs (undergrad and graduate)

I would say “foreigners” that came here as kids and developed under the American high school system as is the case with the Lamongs, Grijalva and Charles Hicks are not the same as the semi professionals African 22 year old “freshmen” that come here to win national titles fresh off the boat.

The difference is the Grijalvas, Nurs, Hicks and Lamongs took years of development under their high school and college coaches before they became good college runners. The schools buying these African athletes ready to win national titles fresh off the airplane don’t help develop our kids who may very well represent our country in future international competitions.

If all schools follow the same route as OK state, New Mexico, Alabama etc and it looks like that’s where we are heading, then what chance do our home grown talent have to develop? OK state is not breaking any rules but it just feels wrong to have your top 5 be semi pro internationals bought to win a national title. No work put into it. My opinion.