worst state for hs xc/track?

SC is not a bad state for xc or track. We have produced a few Olympians and yes a kid won the 1a meet in jordans but that is the small school xc championship. It is NOT an all comers meet. Only high schools can compete.

Thats a pretty unfair statement. For our state size/population I don't think we are that bad and are actually better than quite a few states. I know for sure that Vermont is worse than us.

I'd say Hawaii and Vermont are the weakest overall... West Virginia and Alaska are probably next.

Alaska is hard to judge though because it's next to impossible to get good training in during the winter (a more extreme situation than, say, the Dakotas as was mentioned earlier), but they have incredible conditions to train in during the summer, so they end up noticeably stronger in cross country than they appear in track.

What state was that Ian Edwards kid from? Didn't he win states in XC with a high 17 minute 5K or something like that?

Yeah and most other states make it a competition not an entry fee to get into states. Also did South Carolina send anyone to Footlocker or Nike Nationals? Because WV did. Not sure about how good Alaska is and Vermont is down there pretty low in the running world. As for the insult about Maryland's running slow times at states I know personally that the course is ridiculously tough. Plus this is the state that produced Matt Jablonski and Solomon Haile in the past few years.

I'm from New Hampshire, and we are pretty darn bad compared to bigger states, especially for sprints/jumps, but Vermont makes us look like Olympians. No offense Vermontians. Not too say that Vermont hasn't had some awesome athletes, because they have, but in general, I'm going to have to go with Vermont for this particular thread. At least for states in the East/Northeast, I don't really know much about the Dakotas and other western states with smaller populations.

Yes SC has had runners to make it to footlocker nationals. We have had runners to run for colleges such as Stanford. Every spring we have a bus load of track athletes go to the outdoor nationals just from our county. 2 years ago one of the kids on my team had the second longest jump in the nation. Stephen Davis won the 100 meter national championships. Tim "steriod"'Montgomery set world 100 record but taken away thanks to his involvement in balcony. SC is strong in the sprints and jumps. Look up what Chris Brown jumped to win class AA triple jump title this year. As for distance. Terrence Harrington ran in the 92 olympic 1500 final this year. Matthew Elliot broke 4 minutes for the mile this year and he is a past class A state champion in the 1600 in SC. The title does say xc/ track and yes SC is has produced many quality track athletes. More than a dozen world class athletes. Yes mainly sprints and jumps.

While not a state per say, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan holds a separate state championship for cross country. There are three divisions. The winning time in the most competitive division was 16:56 for a 5k. In the lowest division the winning time was 17:38.

The slow times make a little bit of sense. Only 300,000 people, the largest city having just 20,000. Still the times seem a bit slow for even population that small.

Whatever state you are from

Vermont = Andrew Wheating...

Daddio wrote:

Vermont = Andrew Wheating...

Wheating competed for a New Hampshire private school even though he is a Vermont native. Vermont has had some studly individuals (Elle Purrier, Alec Escholz, Mint Henk, to name a few), but we are not very deep and lose a lot of runners to nordic skiing in the winter.

Proud to be a part of Alabama where times are consistently getting faster.

I live in Nevada, and maybe its just because I moved from a California school, but Nevada seems really slow to me.

LA, MS, and AR are all awful. Not sure if any of those states have ever sent a single runner to Footlocker...

While Florida isn't the worst because it has some great trails to run along the Gulf Coast and in the Panhandle, most of the state is terrible for running. If you turned Florida into North Florida and South Florida, south florida would probably be the worst in the nation. Mississippi and Louisianna would be competing for the honor. For xc, at least.

For distance running, it is easily Louisiana. Hell, 4:30/10:20 will win you a state title. At all of the state meets, only 10 boys ran 4:30 or under.

FSTC wrote:

Proud to be a part of Alabama where times are consistently getting faster.

That's always good to see. We've definitely seen an uptick in faster times over the last several years in Vermont, too, but there still isn't nearly the level of depth that you see in more densely populated states.

JoJoCo wrote:

LA, MS, and AR are all awful. Not sure if any of those states have ever sent a single runner to Footlocker...

Mississippi has sent a couple of runners to Footlocker, but talking about those outliers won't help you drill down to the question of the truly slowest state. That's a matter of depth, and I'm pretty sure, having run there, that MS has the least depth of any state.

I'm not even talking about the lack of runners under 10:00 or under 4:30. I can name every one of the boys in our state who ran under those times in my four years of high school 2002-2006. What's truly revealing is the lack of people running under 5:00 or 11:00, or 18:00. Most kids who ran faster than that were from the same few teams, the ones with decent coaches and established XC programs.

Some teams would have one guy who'd run 4:45 or 10:50 or 17:45, and that guy was their "stud." My freshman year, my team had two of the state's best runners, guys who typically ran in the 16:00s. I had several conversations with guys from other teams who were dumbfounded by how these guys could beat their team's best guy by a minute or more. Then I had the exact same experience watching our "studs" get spanked at our first interstate meet.

It's all about perception of what "fast" is. Interestingly, once Dyestat took off, we started seeing a lot more depth in those modest time ranges.

P.S. MS is quite good in sprints and jumps. We've got lots of excellent basketball and football teams from which to pull talent.

Yeah, this year it was especially bad at the D1 State meet. 9:22 for the winning time? Granted the winner has ran much faster and was just running to win but the number 2 was 9:27.