Convention 2024

Feelings about changes - uncertainty, mainly. Also, the need to make the sport more relevant to outsiders for viewership and more relevant to admins. As with increased relevancy comes obviously more stability in our careers and our sport.

some interesting proposals came up, some formal, some general ideas floated out over some beers. One formal proposal that seemed to gain traction was to increase scoring positions during NCAA finals (ex score down to 12 or 16 spots) which increases directors cup relevancy. Also some ideas to create a scoring system for regionals that may carry through to finals - for the same reason. This got a lot of interest, but obviously needs some logistical work.

Another interesting one (which I don’t recall being a formal topic - but ended becoming a cool conversation amongst a lot of people) was to have scored meets during the regular season, with the results somehow tying into post season participation. This one I originally found somewhat outlandish but ended up pretty well persuaded. Again the “how” and the formatting would need a lot of work - but at the end of the day what hooked me was that it is totally true that our regular season has no meaning to anyone not directly tied to our sport. Casual viewers understand winning and losing and usually don’t grasp the idea for example, flying to BU indoor to drop really great times that take like 30th place. To us, it makes sense.

There was a lot of stuff, feel free to call my take BS, I’m sure other people found hotter topics more relevant to their own ideas. These were the ones that really piqued my interests.

Thanks for the response!

I’ve heard the idea of scoring more meets to help bring some relevance to the sport and help outsiders and even admin understand our sport better. I get the question after meets all the time of how it went and people always looked confused when I don’t talk about a team winning or losing and I'm just like, “well he had some athletes perform well and some that didn’t.” 🤣

Not sure how you would tie that into post season stuff unless you started doing more meets against conference teams, maybe? But for some conferences the costs to see other conference teams every weekend would be cost and logistically prohibitive. I’ve always thought the “new” conferences don’t make sense with how far apart some schools are, at least for the non-revenue sports.

A good start would be to make the conference meets meaningful again. If individual conference champions and relay champions from the Big10, Big12, ACC, SEC, Big East, Big Sky, A10, and Mountain West were guaranteed a spot at nationals, then fans would be drawn to those meets. Any remaining spots at the nationals would be filled by rankings/best performances achieved after the third weekend of April. No need for regionals and a reward for those athletes that put up great marks at regular season invitationals.

the people interest in track and or xc are already interested. you aren't going to get new fans by having dual meets or giving conference champions a spot at nationals. I mean for us folks already interested that would be cool but my brother-in-law who watches football isn't going to care about who wins the 1500 in the ACC

you want to get fans interest? allow betting... that will get new viewers

and unfortunately, the direction this is going is except for at the 40-60 schools who can really handle revenue sharing eventually T&F and XC will be club sports

he's not entirely wrong about a lot of what he said. just not sure what realistically can be done by coaches to save the sport.

That’s part of why I started this thread. I watched his address when it was posted. I have been hearing the call for change the last 5 years- but no one seems to have come up with WHAT needs to change.

Right there with ya. I’ll say this, a lot of people had some great ideas and great insight. A lot of fresh ideas. We just need people to listen and talk about it more than once a year at a convention. My main thought leaving was, whoever you are, put the proposals in and get the ball rolling. Don’t be afraid if you have an idea that you think might be a little off the wall, it might be what we all need! Speak up.

they threw a lot of viewerships stats at us (honestly don’t remember the numbers - but they need to be higher). So a lot of the aim was how do you get more people to watch. My thought after hearing people talk about the scored meets I thought was a bit like - would you turn on Netflix and watch the finale of a show you’re interested in, without having the ability to watch the previous 8 episodes that lead to it? And if you do, would it make any sense at all? Probably not, on both accounts. How would it go? I have my opinions, but that can be figured out.

as noted, he's not entirely wrong about a lot, but he is wrong about a chunk. the lack of viewership isn't completely under the control of coaches or those who run the sport. in fact, it mostly has little to do with those who control the sport. sure, the blame can partially be on us but truthfully there are a lot bigger forces at play here.

As an example, back in the dark ages ( late 70s & 80s) dual meets were a thing. the usc vs ucla meet was a relatively big deal. the stands were packed with 10k-20k fans and the meet was on live TV (at a time when there weren't a million other streaming options). Every event counted and the fans interested in T&F watched. Fast forward to today and dual meets are a thing of the past and that particular meet might get 1k in the stands and they are all just alums of T&F from those schools. That didn't happen because we didn't change the scoring methods. That happened for any number of reasons all out of the control of those who run our sport.

The fact is there are far more interesting things available for folks to be entertained by these days.

I hate to say it because i am a distance runner but most people don't want to watch a distance race... either on the track or on an xc course... it's boring to most anyone except distance athletes... so we should eliminate all distance races over 800m?... the jumps... too slow... all those heights folks have to wait through to get to the winner.. the hammer, disc and shot put also painfully slow for the non-fan... so lets get rid of those?

the loss of audience has little to do with scoring. it has to do with the fact that it's not exciting to your average person.... how do you make it more exciting?? make it faster... but then it's not T&F... you could also make it more dangerous... that would interest people... if someone could get hurt then maybe folks would tune in... obviously I am not saying we should do that i'm just pointing out what people want to see these days.

as i said in my first post... the way to get outsiders interested is to allow betting...

you could supplement that by changing the set up in distance events that for anything longer than 800, the guy in last place every lap is pulled from the track (people could bet on who that is too)... for field events you could set things up so that athletes would go head to head against each other at the same time... example, two long jump runways and pits next to each other... one jumper in each runway... a gun goes off and both have to start their jump at the same time... the person who jumped farther advances to the next round... ... this it would change the sport but make it more interesting, especially to bettors.

look i think that is all dumb but my bro in law who is watching football because he can bet on it just doesn't care about track but since he does bet maybe something like that might peak his interest

This was the DUMBEST idea. The regular season does matter, your times can qualify you for NCAAs. How would it increase excitement when a 13:10 guy is forced to race a bunch of guys that can't break 14:30?

Are sprint coaches really going to quadruple their best athletes to win a 6 team meet in early April?

The BU meets are the most highly anticipated indoor meets outside of NCAAs. They are stacked with pro runners and Flotrack viewership is extremely high (and the facility is PACKED for 2 days straight).

Track is a very complex sport. While scoring is complex it seems to me we need to compete at a meet and have team scores. First thing I would do is consider making all meets from duals to the Penn Relays be scored. Even if you say you got 29th out of 100 teams it at least provides something people understand versus "um, we did good". I would change scoring so that every competing athlete in all meets gets points. So if there are 85 5k runners the first place guys gets 85 pts...... No big deal if there are 85 5k runners and 125 100m runners. Being the best on a given day is part of true competition.

We also need to make the experience move at a faster pace. At BU I have seen 200m heats start 30 seconds after the last person from the previous heat finished. We should have a 1 minute limit just like we have for field events. Have a countdown clock for all running events. They will be called to their marks after 1 minute.

Actually use tffrs for entries and seeding. All entries must be no more than 1 year old-period. If you have a no mark you actually run in the slower/slowest section.

Revise how to qualify for XC and Track. Conference Champions in each event should advance to regional. Then we can add the next "x" athletes in rank order from TFRRS to fill out the fields to 48 per region. All Conference team champions should advance to first round of NCAA XC Championship. Limit XC regional to conference champion teams plus the next number of at large. Have 2 regions of 32 team plust qualified individuals.

regarding your first point... scoring all meets and the thought that even if your team gets 29th out of 30 teams it means something... it doesn't mean anything, no one would care. and to illustrate that i give you xc scoring... no one cares if you were 14th out of 20 teams and State U's xc invite...

as for the qualifying for regionals by winning your conference meet... that wouldn't make a difference to people either... and to illustrate that point they used the same argument to create regionals... it didn't create more interest... it's not the scoring that's the problem..

and the allow only conference team champs and runners up into the regional xc meet is also a bad idea until they make it so every team competing has the exact same number of athletic scholarships to start. the current set up is you have some teams using all 12.5 (and 18 for women) scholarships on distance competing against teams who use very few scholarships for distance. you want to make it interesting? start by making everyone have the same scholarship structure for xc.

What has Sam Seems done to help this sport at the collegiate level? He has been the CEO of USTFCCCA for 20 years, and our sport at the collegiate level is in the worst place it's been in the last 20 years (this is according to Sam Seems). To me it seems like the coaches association needs new leadership.

Honestly, what has he done to actually improve the sport or the situations for coaches?

It is long past his time to retire. He talked about change in his speech at the convention. The first change that needs to be made is in USTFCCCA leadership.

Scoring isnt the full solution but it improves things. We arent gonna get fans anyway but our ADs need to see some sort of value. They like wins/losses and even in xc scoring they as who you beat. They dont ask that for track. We beed a solution that advances athletes but also makes each meet more than a time trial.

trying to even out scholarships is not any kind of solution. Schools will find “unique merit based” or some other weird scholarship to cheat the system.

This is one of the inherent “problems” with track and field that is very difficult to solve. No other sport doesn’t play their starter in a regular season game (unless it’s a blow out) because they don’t want their starter to not be tired or hurt during championship season. But track and field does that allll the time because we have to “peak” at the right time. We don’t need them to double, triple, or quadruple every weekend because there is no “win-loss” at a regular season meet. But most team sport players play their whole game. (I know it’s not a perfect comparison). An easy fix though is to just limit the number of events an athlete can compete in during these regular season meets. Say 2 event max so coaches can’t abuse the good athletes. Also helps see what teams have more depth.

You could change this by incentivizing/making regular season meets part of the qualification process (outside of the descending order list). And then all of a sudden the “robustness” of an athlete is going to become a KPI, along with coaches strategy on what event to run athletes in at each meet if there is a Team win-loss record attached to every meet.

I understand this would probably be terrible for the physical health the athlete, and may not produce the fastest times at the end of the season, but I think that’s why track gets this bad rap because nothing really matters until the conference or national championship and everyone is just chasing times and not competition.

I agree with the scoring every meet. Even if it doesn’t lead to any sort of post season qualification process. The argument that people don’t care if stuff is scored is because it’s always been done that way. But if you start scoring every meet it gives opportunities to start building story lines for media and stat lines that don’t currently exist. “Oh you’re having a dual against “X” team and the past 10 match you have been 5/5, who is going to win this one?!” It starts to mean something. This can help get people more interested if all of a sudden they start seeing headlines about their school that they have a winning or losing track season. But track doesn’t get reported outside of niche media because there’s no easy way to report it to normal people that makes simple sense. It might take some time, but it would start to make a difference once you start having some historical stat lines.

The only “problem” with this is because of the broad competition that track has, it might strain travel budgets to make a schedule that is somewhat “even” in competition level with schools in your area. Because we know the majority of schools can’t fly across country to see conference foes or similarly matched/funded teams every weekend.

This discussion was sort of about how to get more fans because that is what would add value. I just don't think our AD would see any added value in us getting 15th at some random track meet..

i don't feel how we score is the issue.

As for making qualifying for XC regionals based on conference results, if that is done without starting with equal scholarships my prediction is you will see more XC teams being dropped. It will hurt the sport more than help it.

And I do agree that schools will do their best to find ways to manipulate things but to allow it as a starting point just seems to make no sense.

all jmo.

budget issues are why it was changed from dual meets to what we have now. and with new roster limits how do you field a team for a dual meet?

as noted by a poster above.. the use vs ucla dual meet is no longer important to anyone but ucla & usc track alums... it's not about the scoring.

How many people would watch college football or basketball if the players sucked as bad as 75% of the people who compete in track meets? Someone who is the equivalent of a 50-second 400 dude would never ever see the field or the court in those sports, unless it was in a blowout game. Same with the guy who throws 120 in the discus in flight four. That's like a guy who can't hit the backboard on a free throw attempt.

The reason most track meets suck for spectators is they drag on and on with endless heats that feature people who aren't very good. Let the ham'n'eggers run at some mid-week all-comers type meet and have the good people go in the actual spectator-friendly gatherings.