How about some love for Lipscomb and coach Nick Polk? They were 11th at NCAAs with no transfers and no foreigners.

SUPER impressive as I agree that foreigners are ruining our colleges as they are taking spots from American runners which is a big deal as these are American colleges. Thanks for sharing :)

The first sentence of Polk's quote is far more important than the second. Inherently, there is nothing wrong with transfers or foreign student athletes. I ran D3, we had both. None of them came to the school because it was anything but the right fit for both them and the school. Coaches should be trying to limit the number of athletes they bring in that transfer out. Transferring is good, it allows athletes more control to get out of a bad situation. Foreign athletes are a good thing. It increases the competition and provides opportunity to the best athletes to get an advanced education paid for. I don't believe schools should be penalizing people based on something they have no control over like where they were born.

Also, Rojo, you own a website. If you want to give a program some love, why don't you call Nick Polk up and write a feature profile about how he's turned his team into a top 10 program rather than try and trigger a hate filled message board post with an anti-foreigner agenda.

Feels like that was a drum to bang a year ago, why now? Did you not know this had happened until this article?

being an A-Sun school yet still managing to be the best XC program in the same city with a SEC member institution is very impressive

lipscomb has that “vertical crust” if you will

You act like this is common knowledge. I appreciate the post rojo despite trolls and haters trying to tear down the only journalism in the sport.

I do agree with the other poster suggesting to get a write up with him so he can discuss his philosophy and methodology when it comes to training!

I'd argue that state schools should absolutely favor in state athletes over out of state, and American athletes over foreigners. Kenyans aren't paying taxes that support public universities.

Lipscomb should be good because they are the Christian version of BYU.

Not at altitude but a much bigger pool to recruit from. There are way more Christians than Mormons.

Ha! Tell that to EKU, WVU, Arkansas, Florida, Wisconsin & Alabama. They'll tell you to eff off and mind your business. Both the contribution to the school's brand-building via athletic accomplishments and cultural enhancement of the student body more than makes up for the unpaid taxes you cite.

The last 5 are power conference schools with brands built on revenue sports. Eastern kentucky(?) has no brand. Zero colleges build any sort of valuable brand on cross country running.

”cultural enhancement” is nonsense.

Weird OP but I understand the sentiment. Back in the day, as a state school, we were 10th at NCAAs with 2 foreigners and the team was criticized for it. Not widely but on these boards of course. Neither of them were in our top 5. One of them was on/off varsity throughout the season. They were good runners but not stars. So what does that mean? They did not ruin our team. They added to it and made it a better environment to train. Everyone else was from the area. The kicker is there was almost no coaching. Bad coaching, in fact. It was just a good group of runners who simply made it work. Now we have an example of 1) foreign runners who hardly made a difference and 2) a top 10 team with bad coaching. Lets be careful with generalizations.

And buy talent? It sounds like you just said that every pro team can just toss out the coach because, well, they just take the best talent. Hey, maybe that is true!

Polk is also just an all around good guy. Happy to see him having success.

yeah if you have foreigners on your team there should be a rule that they can't be fast as if theyre fast than all of the "all americans" aren't white as most american distance runners are white instead they are black as most african distance runners are black

Lipscomb has 5 foreign athletes on the roster this year.

I don't know why this is even a noteworthy curiosity. It's NOTHING. Dozens and dozens of NCAA teams have done much better in the past -- with less.

Polk said. "We didn’t have a single transfer on the line and we didn’t have a single international kid on the line." In four years my college teams never had any of that and never had a runner over 22 years old. Our explanation was simple, "That's what we do."

Seriously Rojo, whats going on with all of these bizarre threads lately? It seems like every other week you're bent on putting the bat-sh!t in crazy. Explanation? I seriously want to understand what's going on here?

I agree that's what should be done but the rules state that your allowed to have foreigners as they should change the rules. But I agree with you that "that's what we do" should be done by ALL teams that no foreigners should be on your team or if they are they should be slow as the podium should have whtie american boys and not foreigners