Considering Quitting

Making the team, as opposed to being on the club is an entirely different competitive, training, and social experience. Not sure you can really understand, just yet, what you might miss out on. Still, no matter what, there are no bad choices here. It is all about what experiences you value most. Everyone quits eventually.

EE is one of the more demanding majors you can pick in college, and you may eventually find there is a conflict between being on the varsity team (where running can be more like a "job" than a fun extra-curricular activity) and your studies and other college life. Unfortunately, the workload often gets more demanding with the upper division classes (true for most majors). Talk to the varsity coach now about the best time/opportunity to walk onto the team (next Fall XC season?). You may need to hit a performance standard, try-out, red shirt, etc. Look at the roster and see if anyone is currently majoring in EE or another engineering major and meet with them about balancing the workload with being on the team with practices, travel, competition. If you don't see anyone on the team with a hard technical major (similar to EE), that may be a sign that you would be taking on too much. It's perfectly OK to stay on the club team, work with the coach and continue to improve even if you are faster than the others.

I guess I hadn't quite factored that in. Even in high school my team was very sparse, and I never really took any team sports seriously so that could be a valuable experience. How would you describe the difference between a club setting vs. a college team?

Yeah the increasing workload combined with the increased work of being on the varsity team does worry me a bit. There are a few guys on the team who are in similarly "difficult" programs, but a few are doing fairly extended degrees, sometimes by up to two years which doesn't interest me whatsoever. Good stuff to think about. Thanks for the advice.

Keep at it! You only get a small amount of time to be at your physical peak and run fast! Make the most of it!

Give the college team experience a go before deciding to quit.

I think that there is a level of seriousness and comradeship in an actual team as opposed to a college club, that is more likely to forge a long term shared experience that leads to life long friendships. At least that was my experience with a university team, and I am comparing it to post-collegiate club (which is not exactly the same as a college club like you have referenced). You are already too good for the club team. With a team, since all of you have the same rough datelines for both exams and races, all of you know exactly when you can party and when you cannot. I think i was lucky to have a team where the guys and girls teams socialized together (and I know that is not always the case), but it really made for a large social circle that brought in a lot of people outside the sport (roommates and dorm mates) together and made life great for most of us.

i said it before:no wrong choices. Whatever you do, don't wast your time on regrets.

Quit for now, and put it on pause... if you like running enough to join a club my guess is that you will come back to it once you are done studying, and have a job. That might be 5 years, that might be 15 years, who knows.. but my experience is that there is a certain runner that always comes back. You sound like one of those type of runners.

Plenty of d2/d3 schools would take you.
Find one of those with electrical engineering and go for it.
Fortune favors the bold.

i bet if you email 100 coaches you get 15-20 replies. Good luck.

You run club there is literally no pressure. Honestly you seem to be a pretty talented runner and if you are gonna obsess about it you may as well do so on a team where you can get optimal training and make lifelong friendships. Most of my closest friendships are people I ran with in college, I literally have no idea what my life would look like without it. Collegiate running essentially ended up paying for my master's through being a graduate assistant coach. Plenty of D2s and D3s have engineering (Schools of Mines and MSOE are two that come to mind), where you could also run and suffer with other engineers.

The offseason from November-January and May-August is the time to do all the physical activity you want. I'm really into hiking and mountaineering and I've been able to balance going to the mountains 1-2x a week into my normal base training without much issue.

Also, the team aspect of college XC/TF is probably the most fun part of the sport. Depending on the team, you'll also likely be around people who are less neurotic than you, and are more interested in having a good time in college, which I think would be a good influence on you. Give it a year, if you still don't enjoy it you can quit without always wondering "what if".

Quitting is a bad habit to get oneself into. Try to avoid it until your last day on the planet.

Sounds like you have a lot of potential and you've run very well for the amount of training you've done, shoot Ive been training for 5 years and you're already faster than me. I think it'd make sense to stick with it a little longer and see how you do, and Ive noticed that throughout the time Ive ran Ive had phases where running wasn't enjoyable, but so far Ive come to end up enjoying it again. If you don't enjoy anymore after a solid season of consistent training and racing then just quit, or that's what I would do anyway