Cross Country scheduling for colleges.....has it changed that much in 30 years? for example:

In D3 we race every other week, never had a duel meet. Probably because of both $ and no need to race every week.. more room for training. 6 races total, not including nationals.

Just guessing; but could it be smaller budgets and less emphasis on cross country as a sport these days?

In the early 70s we ran primarily a dual meet schedule beginning the end of September and running into mid-November. We raced six to eight dual and tri meets, often racing twice weekly, and towards the end of the season ran the EICAA (primarily small college New England), the New Englands, and the IC4As. The NCAA did not have regional qualifying meets and did not pay expenses to Nationals. Our success was largely measured by our won-loss record in dual meets.

today's coaches and AD's don't want to put much effort into scheduling or spending any money on cross country.

Too expensive to travel for duel meets and few coaches care about the win- loss record. Just perform at the conference meet, etc...

It has changed a lot, we raced almost every weekend which was to much. We also ran a lot more 10ks where today, most meets are 8k. I think colleges have swung the other way in that they don't race enough. Elite teams don't race their top 7 together until the conference meet and the top guys run approximately 4 races with one of them being an easy time trial victory. I think Wisconsin would have won a couple more championships if they had raced their top 7 together more. It takes a few races to get used to the distance and for teammates to know who they should be close to or beat in races.

Several teams are switching to a format where they run a single race but it's scored as several duals. This means that they meet the required number of "meets" but don't have to wear themselves out racing every weekend.

Scheduling has become sending your team to PreNats and one other high profile meet while letting your B team run in local meets in September. Thirty years ago, teams were not flying across the nation like they are now. Rarely did top teams race outside their own regions.

My beef is changing posted schedules by either not showing up or adding meets after the season starts to fulfill NCAA minimum requirements. One change that got me was the 2009 home invitational at Tennessee was cancelled ten days before the meet due to lack of competition. What did the coaches do all summer that they had to find out in September that they made them want to cancel their home meet?

We used to be pretty stupid with our training/racing regimen. Now we are smarter and don't waste time running duel meets. Duel meets are an antiquated east coast relic of distance running. I went to high school in the west and came east to go to college. I was totally dumbfounded when I realized that some of my new teammates had been racing 2 or 3 times per week in dinky little races. A duel meet might be good for one race a year against a nearby rival.

DUAL meets teach you how to actually race. It's one on one basically.

XC teams were categorically better in the 70s and 80s. Most of the all-time best TEAMS were from that era.

Training is nice...but how do you learn to race without actually racing? You don't...then you end up with an epic fail when you actually do have to race something other than a time trial.

Alan

Runningart2004 wrote:

DUAL meets teach you how to actually race. It's one on one basically.

Or seven on seven?

These days colleges run 1) an alumni race or time trial around Sept 1st. 2)they run in a couple of big invitationals. 3) conference. 4)regional and (maybe) 5) nationals.

are they improving and running as well in late Oct and Nov as their counterparts from the 70s and early 80s did who ran a meet every Saturday from Sept 10 to early Nov; ran 2-4 dual meets and learned how to compete and get faster every weekend? No, no way; but, the emphasis is different now. As someone stated, teams in the 70s never flew anywhere unless it was Nationals and we drove a van 2/3 of the way across the country for that. I never flew anywhere once in college and I went to Nationals in cross country and track. It's a different mindset and set of priorities today. Good or bad? You decide.

From The Stands wrote:

It has changed a lot, we raced almost every weekend which was to much. We also ran a lot more 10ks where today, most meets are 8k. I think colleges have swung the other way in that they don't race enough.

That was our schedule as well. We ran anywhere from 13-17 races each year when I was in school and maybe three of them had more than three teams competing. I liked it because ALL of our training was interval work and races meant a day which was easier than a normal training sessions preceded by a very easy day.

Whether the new schedules are better or not is not the question, the bigger issue is what its affect on the limited publicity a XC team gets within the school, etc.

If there no races on a given weekend, nothing will be written about the team in the school newspaper/web sites etc. Neither is there any reason to mention them in local media coverage.

College football has at least 10 games, with only 4 or 5 XC races in the season, it does not bode well to keep the sport in the public eye. Lord knows XC need it!

Do they at least run the JV or 'B' teams on off weekends? It would Give them something to write about.

I like the racing every weekend, we did that in college and it worked for me. I try to model that for my high school team now as well. The problem is we have two weeks where league meets get in the way. So we double up one week and use the second league meet as a workout...

I am against races 2-3 times a week, that leaves no room for training and proper recovery. But racing every 2-3 (or 4) weeks is crazy. PR's are set in races and that is what makes this sport fun...the competition!

Having one race a week, every week from Sept to Nov was no burden at all. In fact we looked forward to it. It gave us a nice, easy day, the day before the meet, (jogging 6 miles) and then the meet day itself. A breakup in our typical 90-110 mile weeks. We improved every week from pre season to nationals. We weren't 'babied'. It made us better and tougher.

kids today..geeezzz wrote:

Having one race a week, every week from Sept to Nov was no burden at all. In fact we looked forward to it. It gave us a nice, easy day, the day before the meet, (jogging 6 miles) and then the meet day itself. A breakup in our typical 90-110 mile weeks. We improved every week from pre season to nationals. We weren't 'babied'. It made us better and tougher.

I totally agree.

30 years ago, not sure, but I can give you the perspective from 23 and 24 years ago because that was the 2 years I ran XC in college (my junior and senior years, 1985 and 1986), and I can give you the perspective today because I coach the program I once ran for. For our program, the mid 1980's were when the transition from dual meet scheduling to Invitational scheduling took place.

The years I ran we opened the first week of September and raced weekly through Regionals in early November. We ran 2 dual meets both years against local schools that we had traditionally run dual meets against, so dual meets were still happening then but were on the way out. 1 was on the weekend and 1 was midweek. Either 1986 or 1987 was the last year we scheduled those dual meets. All the other weeks we ran Invitationals, ranging in size from 5 schools to 25 schools. Conference Meet was earlier than it is now by a couple weeks, so it wasn't 2 weeks before Regionals. We also ran in a State Meet in early October.

Prior to when I was on the team the results archive (late 1970's through 1984) shows our school did 2-3 Invitationals, the State Meet, plus 5-6 dual/tri meets each year. We were not in a conference so no conference meet, and we didn't start going to Regionals as a team until 1983. As you can see, it was a much different mix.

Today, we race weekly with 2 or 3 off weeks during the season, which is more weeks racing than a lot of schools do but it works for us. We don't have Track, so I want to get the kids to races in the fall to enjoy their sport. We do 1 tri meet, 1 alumni meet and everything else is Invitationals. No dual meets. We still have the State Meet same as when I was racing. In the 9 years I've been coaching our schedule has been remarkably consistent with Regionals, the Conference Meet, and the State Meet all held on the exact same place on the calendar. Of course that changes next year with DII NCAA's being held in December.

Oh, as far as distances when I was racing it was mostly 8k/5 miles except we still had a few older courses than were longer. For example our home course was 5.2 miles and Middlebury was 5.4 miles. Once in awhile you'd race a short course but not 5k, more like 4.5 miles. Funny, I don't ever remember asking my coach how far a race was, except I knew Regionals was 10k. Since I've been coaching every course we've raced has been 8k or 5 miles, and pretty reasonably accurate IMO, other than Regionals and NCAA's at 10k. I do see a trend of more schools having men's races at 5k or 4 miles or even 6k (McGill I believe) but since our program focuses our long-term development at 10k and longer I don't see the point in spending our budget to go to shorter races.

That's my perspective on ~25 years of changed scheduling.

Great input in this thread, including some helpful reminders about current conditions. Curiously, I think the demise of dual meets in *track* has had an impact on cross-country!

Of course the drop in scholarship numbers helped to doom the elite collegiate dual meet in track (man, I remember those epic UCLA/USC duals...); but something that affected more than just the elite/DI schedule was the adoption, by ~90% of American colleges and universities, of the early start/early finish academic calendar back in the 1970s and '80s. With terrible weather (at least in the Northeast) often a reality until mid-April, and conference meets in the first week of May, there simply isn't *time* to put together a decent dual/tri-meet track schedule anymore.

So emphasis in track and field shifted, from posting a winning regular-season record to performing well at the conference meet (perhaps) and Nationals. To get qualifying marks for Nationals, athletes often have to take expensive trips (can't afford too many of those!) to get decent weather conditions, and have to concentrate all their energy on doing a single event. Multiple events, to help the team score? Ridiculous--particularly because often there *isn't* a team score.

So in track, t&f/xc programs have already lost the focus on Ws and Ls. But how does this affect cross? Well, some coaches--particularly those with limited resources and/or abilities--saw that they could get away with concentrating all their cross-country/track scholarship monies on just a few events, often the distance events, and then justify finishing DFL in the conference *track* meet by pointing to how well they did in *xc*, where their distancemen would shine.

But that means they *have* to do well in cross-country: have to take "big" (i.e. expensive) trips, to meet teams from other regions; have to beat those teams, to improve the chances of being selected for Nationals; and hence have to peak for those few races *and* avoid losing other races. Dual or tri meets (where you might get beat, and where you'd use up travel $--with no championship at stake) just don't seem to fit that scenario.

To the coaches and ADs (who are already conditioned--by track--not to expect a regular-season tally of wins and losses), I suppose this all feels reasonable. But you know what? Kids--yes, even collegians--*like to race*. It's actually why most of them originally go out for the sport. (Did YOU go out for cross-country so you could race maybe once or twice a month?) And college teams demonstrated BITD that you could race (nearly) every week, with a schedule of mostly dual and tri meets (which are not so draining), and still build for outstanding performances at the end of the season. I think it was more fun, for the runners AND the rest of the student body, back then. You could feel like you were actually part of a school sport, and you could feel yourself improving as a runner and a racer and a team member every week.

Sorry for the lengthy and disjointed rant--don't have time to shorten it! One final point: A while back (must be 20-30 years ago now) a pretty solid study demonstrated that the DI teams who ran more 6M/10K races in the regular season tended to do better in the championships. So to see teams a) limiting the number of their races AND b) limiting the distances in the few races they DO run, just seems crazily counterproductive.