Why do so many HS stars get so hyped up, go to a great school, and then vanish off the earth once they compete?

I don’t know, I think people talk about it quite a bit. It probably has to do with over training in high school. And then having nowhere else to go, training, wise, in college. And maybe just generally overtraining, how many 100 mile weeks are most people equipped to run?

This is absolutely nothing new. You need to get in your head that high school success does not guarantee future success. Sometimes it has to do with doing too much and working too hard in high school, other times it's any one of countless factors. Look at the all-time high school lists from the 70s, 80s and 90s. Did prep legends like Obea Moore, Michael Granville, William Reed, Jeff Nelson, Eric Hulst, etc. go on to have great college and pro careers? No.

No one talks about this? What, are you brand new to LRC? People make threads about this all the time, throughout any given year. Yes, some super preps DO become great collegians and pros: Allyson Felix, Noah Lyles, Grant Fisher, Emily Sisson... every individual and situation is different.

And track and field is not alone in this. Ever hear of Emoni Bates, supposedly the greatest prep hoops player ever a few years ago? Happens in basketball, baseball, football, tennis, etc., etc.

If you're really good as a teen or preteen in any sport, it's almost impossible not to want to keep getting better. But it's very, very hard to be on an improvement curve from age 13 or 14 all the way until your late 20s. That's part of the reason some of the best college and pro athletes are a bit of late bloomers.

Neck up, overtrained, not able to handle independence or be multifaceted in their interests. Short attention span, bored, body changes, distracrions....no helicopter parents....

This is why Nico Young's and to a slightly lesser extent Sahlman's almost immediate success is so impressive.

Probably the same reason why so many great college athletes don't make it in the pro's. Some people peak earlier than others, get injured and never recover or just lose interest.

Because for a vast majority of humans, the misery of cross country and track training isn't worth it and there's nothing wrong with that.

Why do you care so much? It is the obsessive fans who overhype them on forums and social media.

I think it matters that HSers are generally carefree and supremely confident, free to be in love with running and competing. That changes in college and sucks a lot of the passion out of it

I agree with this and will add the perspective of a professor (former runner and coach, now a triathlete/duathlete) that a lot of runners have confided in over the years.

What I hear is that it is hard for a lot of them to go from the front of the field in every race to be mid or back-of-the-pack while training harder (they see it as worse results after more work). It doesn't matter if they are actually getting faster. They expect that. Unfortunately many of them think they will hold their position in the field (if they contested to win races in high school, many of them expect that to happen immediately in college).

I'm amazed by how many have told me that their high school coach was better than the college coach (again, that is in spite of running faster) because under their high school coach they "won races."

Couple that with burnout, injury, the rigors of college in general, getting homesick, alcohol, dating life, and on and on... the transition is not smooth for all of them.

The level of competition is just much higher in college. In high school, there's a tremendous disparity in levels of talent. In college there's much less. At the pro level there's less than that. Some high school stars can't adjust to being small fish in a big pond after being big fish in high school. Some are high school stars because they benefited from early physical maturity in high school. Some just lose interest.

Because progressions is curvilinear not linear we all do not have the same potential. It's hard to know where an athlete is on the curve and how close they are to their max potential.

Alan

This is purely selection effect. Every runner has some inherent talent level that determines their max potential, but every runner will reach that max at a different age. A runner with 8 out of 10 talent who reaches their potential at age 18 will appear to be a HS phenom, but they have no room left to improve.

I don't know if it's possible to predict whether a person has already reached their potential or will continue to improve, but presumably someone who has low training volume history has more upside.

The OP starts off with a faulty premise, which leaves for no room but a faulty conclusion.

The kids are doing alright.

It’s a very complex discussion. First off, the biggest impact is puberty. Some kids mature fully in high school so they stand out. Then the rest catch up. Other important reasons are diet, sleep, stress, and intetest. When you live at home you get healthy meals cooked for you. You can sleep well and no stress from bills to pay. And lastly, you may just lose interest and the fire you had in high school. And then there’s injuries and changes to your training. Me for instance, I was the fastest sophomore and junior in the US in high school for the 1600 my years. I never ran faster the rest of my life. I anchored a DMR national championship. I got perpetually injured and got married and had a kid at 21. My interests changed and I was always hurt anyways so I stopped caring about running. Also the training was different. I was more of a speed runner. I got fast by doing interval work on the track. In college it was all tempo runs and threshold workouts. Those didn’t work for me because I was not an aerobic runner.

HAHAHAHAHA yeah I saw that and stopped reading immediately.

Bell curve, priorities change, environment changes, life changes, mindset changes, motivation changes, interest changes, things happen. It's just statistics, not every high school phenom can become an all time great. This is not complicated.

IDK.

Every kid except for one from the 2023 CA 800m final ran slower this year in college

I don’t know why you’re listing spinters but it’s always going to be injuries, or early physical maturation. Jeff Nelson did overtrain and almost immediately broke down with injuries. Hulst did the same thing, but it didn’t really as he was sporting a full beard as a sophomore in HS and wasn’t going to improve after HS, anyway

In response to other poster’s comments, there no such thing as peaking in HS, and there have been runners that ran up to 100 mpw, that stayed healthy and continued to improve through college.

The story of the basketball player doesn’t really have much to do with anything.

to me the fetish for being the weakest walkon to make the best possible team is the worst athletic situation for success. you will spend 4 years fighting uphill. i personally suggest favoring academics, and then look for the best "fit" program with a good teaching coach where you are highly prized, better than the average runner, and will get heavy investment.

i play soccer and to me this is the erling haaland theory of career moves. haaland is a dominant EPL striker, child of a former Man United player. instead of making an initial big money move to the biggest team willing to pay him, haaland progressively worked up from norway to austria to germany before going to Man City. his agent set him up for success at each stop. your kid probably gets greedy and signs too high. but then this is what many US soccer players do, a quasi-capitalist mistake. we are taught grab the biggest contract for the best team. in college that team may have 20 kids like you.

also, some coaches can recruit but not actually coach. if your college sports recruitment approach is take the big name you might be playing into that unwittingly.