"And we mentioned Hatz for a reason - it has to do with our coverage of the D2 meet and particularly D3 meet. If a high schooler could win a college nationals, then it doesn't deserve nearly the same type of coverage as the D1 meet. Emily Lipari's 4:42 was also pretty darn fast in the girls race at NIN. Before getting too much hate mail we should say we know that D2 mile champs Jessica Pixler and Aaron Braun ran the championship meet at altitude and are both capable of much faster than 4:46 and 4:07 miles."
Let's take this slow, and see if the BloJo's self-gratification for being involved with Division 1 programs is legitimate. Assertion 1: if a high schooler could win a college nationals, then that college nationals need not be covered. I proffer in evidence the fact that, in high school, Jim Ryun and Alan Webb would have trounced the D1 field in the 800 and the mile. Assertion 2: high schoolers can crush the D3 field. I proffer in evidence not only that the D3 mile race was tactical, and that the top milers in the D3 were potentially capable of 4:05 on the day of the race, but that D3 is routinely won by vastly faster people than won it this year. Peter Kosgei, last year, would have beaten any high schooler in the nation, in the mile or the 800, and Mac Chaffee was in the USATF meet last year in the 1500. Not to mention such recent winners as Will Leer and Nick Symmonds, who, I believe, could beat most, if not all, high school runners. I'll further submit in evidence that, not only is the D3 meet routinely won by guys who are capable of 3:45/4:03, but on a number of occasions the D3 meet has been won by runners who could not only compete at, but would be threats to win, D1 nationals. D3 milers have routinely gone to the Olympic trials (see Symmonds and Leer, but also a ton of others), with D3 record holder Karl Paranya finishing second in the USATF meet in a non-Olympic year. Paranya's 3:57 would put him firmly in the hunt for a D1 national title every year.
As per usual, the Brojos fail to provide actual, substantive argumentation for their case, merely providing some kind of facade of justification in order to retroactively justify their arrogance. Even though they're Ivy grads, I probably need to parse that in simpler terms (you know, D3 gives you so much better of an education than D1). What I mean is, WeJo bashed D3 not too long ago. People called him out. Instead of manning up, he started grasping at straws of arguments to justify his own arrogance. Now the Brojos, in the guise of proving that they did the right thing before, bash again. Instead of ignoring the issue, taking the high road, and just covering the meets, they have to bash D3. No one would have complained about limited D3 coverage; the amount they gave in their recap was fine. But I'm going to complain because they can never just deliver news. They always have to make themselves look good, and carry out their own self-righteous grudges. They may be good for the sport in terms of generating interest and vibrancy, but God I wish the people we had running Letsrun had even an iota more class. They write poorly, they cover things poorly, and they run the website like amateur schoolboys using it to play favorites and attack their enemies. I can see why that dude who won the Heps 1500 ended up getting disqualified; with role-models like these, he would have been lucky not to pull some amateur stunt and get himself tossed.
Please, please, please, think before you speak, and proofread what you've written. Remember that saying, if you don't have something nice to say, don't say it? What does bashing D3 get you, other than a snicker from your cronies and the skepticism of everyone who realizes our best hope for an American-born middle distance medal is a D3 guy? I hope you got your kicks out of being jerks, but you've lost the respect of a lot of people who are forced by scarcity to frequent your site for news.