USATF Youth Indoor National Champs Cancelled

Problem is gen z doesn't want to visit these wacky red states. Moscow Mitch made sure KY was hoisted by its own petard.

There was significant confusion on when the entry deadline was/is. On the USATF youth meet webpage the deadline is listed as March 5, which makes sense for the March 8-10 meet. But on the athletic.net meet page it says February 15. My guess is they didnt have entries yesterday because everyone thinks the deadline is March 5. Hopefully the cancellation is an error.

Here's two reasons entries were so low:

1. It was the same weekend as Nike Indoor Nationals

2. The athletic.net entry portal did not let a lot of eligible athletes enter. I had to contact the meet director, who told me to talk to USATF, who told me to contact Athetic.net, who said they would open the entry portal for 20 minutes me to manually enter my athlete. Finally got him entered on Tuesday of this week.

The reason the entries were screwed up was my athlete is categorized as 19 for U20, but is still 18 through March 10 so he was eligible to compete in the 17-18 division in the meet. The athletic.net entry system, however, automatically kicked out anyone who came up as 19.

My athlete was originally planning on trying to make the U.S. team for World U20 in Lima Peru, but we heard rumors that the U.S. is considering not sending a team, so we decided to enter the National Youth Indoor Championships instead.

Yes, I think it absolutely has to do with the fact that way too many meets are in the same state lately. XC was just in Louisville only 3 months ago, and its not exactly a tourist attraction that makes people want to go back again.

Overall, next year will be 4 out of 5 years that USATF XC JO will have been in Kentucky - 20 & 21 in Lexington, 23 & 24 in Louisville. Up through 20, we were following the West (15, 18), Central (16,19), East (17, 20) guidelines that have existed for 20 years. Now they just abandoned those?

Another potential issue with getting bids is the word that supposedly, USATF has greatly raised the bidding fees, making it much more difficult, and less desirable, for people to put in bids. And may have made it more costly in terms of what the host city had to provide as well? Can't verify if this is true, but that was the word floating around at XC in December. If true, stop messing with a good thing. JO's should not be a big money maker, it should be to help build the sport.

Meanwhile AAU indoor nationals has plenty of entries. VA Beach I think.

Maybe they can sue some of their own people again to fix it. LMFAO

The sport would be better off with some consolidation and better organization. As it is there are like 6 or 7 different national championships for the middle school ages, both in indoor and outdoor (AAU, AAU JO or U14, USATF, USATF JO, New balance, nike, adidas?). Then there are many random meets that just throw in the word national to make it sound better - such as the "Ocean Breeze National Youth Invitational" on march 16. At least a few have some qualifying procedure/standards, which make it interesting for the kids and give them something to chase after. A lot are just open to anyone though. For the kid that has no shot of winning, is there any value to travel to any of these meets? Of course not, thats why the entry lists in all of them is largely just a long list of local kids, which soft of devalues the meet for those near the top. In the northeast there is no shortage of opportunities to run against equal competition without having to drive or fly a day away. I don't know what I'm trying to say, only that it's a mess and not a bad thing for there to be fewer of these "national" events.

Louisville has a great facility for indoor. I'm sure that's part of the reason. Maybe nobody else wants to bid for the events?

Every other facility already has their own national championship meet.

I’m not paying $2-3k for my kid to go run a mile at an indoor track against some other rich kids

Canceled for 2025 too it seems?

Thanks for the chuckle Roger. I hope you have a great day.

No it's not. It's March 21st-23rd at Ocean Breeze in NYC.

Seems like they are being hosted at Ocean breeze (NY) this year. Registration opens tomorrow on athletic.net.

Wow. I know where to look and could not find it. What a fiasco. It's not on USATF website (awesome). Even a google search is fairly fruitless. I found it on Runnerspace and it still looks suss. Do you know if it's a go for sure? Feels awfully afterthought-ish

This is all I can find:

usatf-youth-indoor-championships.runnerspace.com

USATF Youth Indoor Championships

USATF Youth Indoor Championships - Cancelled for 2024

Link:usatf-youth-indoor-championships.runne...

AAU 1st week of March

NB 2nd week.

Usatf 3rd week

athletic.net

Track & Field, Cross Country Results, Statistics

Meet results and team scores.

Link:www.athletic.net/TrackAndField/meet/57...

Looks like they pushed registration back a couple more days....

The meet is in NYC at Ocean Breeze. Why would you say it's cancelled?

It's been posted on USATF's website for the past 6 weeks at least. The meet was announced in December and the schedule and meet information has been available since the start of January.

The meet is in New York, the meet was in NY from 2016 through 2022 and every year had between 4,000-6,000 entries. This year will be no different.