USATF Jr Olympics and little kids

[quote]big show wrote:

No 8-year-old has to travel to find competition at their level. We have low-key all-comer meets over the summer in my town, which include everyone from kids to 1:4X 800m guys from the local university. If an 8-year-old in our town is so fast that he/she can't find competition amongst other local 8-year-olds, they can just come on down to the track for one of these meets.

I guess it is easy to feel that way when you have never attended an event that has thousands of kids (just kids, no adults) from all over the U.S. and seem the fun kids have in being part of a team, hanging out with their friends and family and basically vacationing most of the time. I think supporting local meets is cool, but you have to also keep in mind that most of these JO kids have beat the best local kids by a considerable margin and look forward to competing themselves against the best kids in venue and manner that looks like what they see with their idols do. Just about every sport has some sort of national championships for kids, why should our sport be different. Btw, you rarely see any pressure being put on an 8 years old. People usually don't travel across the country for their 8 year old, usually the 8 year old has an older brother or sister competing as well and/or one of their parent is a coach. These meets are mostly a vacation for the 8 year olds.

The AAU/USATFs JOs are a lot of fun when done correctly, my kids remember the family fun, the hotel pool and eating out everyday more than the meets.

So what? Too bad for them, they missed out. I hope they enjoyed their lame soccer game and orange slices.

Of course but that is merely because extremely few kids attempt to run distance events.

Big deal, he is living a happy, successful life. I'm sure he is proud of those records. He probably was not elite material anyway (just from a statistical pov) so what does it matter? He got his glory while he could. Though to be honest, I think running 26 mi is ludicrous at any age.

Nobody claims otherwise.

I think this depends on your association. My association does not have a pre-qualifier for usatf and does not pay to send anyone to nationals. The cost is comparable in my state unless you are doing only 1-2 events then USATF is cheaper. It is $20 to join USATF for youth, $14-16 for AAU for youth. Then $6 per individual event for USATF vs $20 flat fee for AAU. If you're doing 4+ events then USATF is a better deal. AAU has smaller regions than USATF, so in that sense, AAU might be overall cheaper depending on the locations of regionals and nationals in relation to your home that particular year since the smaller regions with AAU make it more likely it will be closer to you.

I did some of both for a year or two in high school and have worked many USATF JO meets in my state. I only did a few USATF JO state meets because the regional was much further away and the state meets I did were horribly disorganized and not very competitive making me not want to make my parents spend money taking me to a far away regional. The AAU meets were also not well organized, but were closer to my house for the regional and national so I chose to do the AAU JO Nationals one year in 9th grade. The AAU meet was more competitive locally than USATF, but the USATF regional was more competitive than the AAU one. In my state, the sprints were more competitive than the distance events overall for summer track, although in general my state does not generally produce many good sprinters beyond the state level. Few people did the distance events making it kind of a joke up until nationals. The AAU national was a fun experience. They had a cool opening ceremony for all sports kind of like the Olympics. It was a good experience to run against people WAY better than me at nationals in a championship that felt big. This did prepare me for state championships in high school. Overall, I decided not to do it again next summer because it was not fun competing by myself in the summer in middle distance races.

From my observations, the environment at these summer meets seemed very intense for small children and a little over the top with little kids in speed suits and spikes using blocks with coaches yelling at them for making technical errors. I don't know if I would recommend these meets for an 8 year old based on my experience, but I know others who have had good experiences with them. I would say if your kid enjoys running and you keep it fun then go ahead and try it. I think your child would have more fun doing it with a developmental club rather than alone though.