What are your thoughts on dual meets?

Dual meets are ok. We have 5 a season, one with each member of our conference. Some teams are really crappy, others are a challenge. I think they're a great idea because anyone from the team can compete as long as they are not injured and eligible. Plus it establishes some great rivalries and breeds familiarity with other teams.

I ran for Lafayette. There was nothing more exciting than indoor and outdoor dual with Lehigh. (cross not so much but Lehigh can't win them all some day there might be a comet or something that lands on the course)

But anyway always exciting, and (gasp) I could get non running friends to come to the dual meet.

Definitely good for the sport and something that's missing. Promote competition and uncertainly with lots of doubling/tripling etc, and the team score is something your average fan could relate too.

No endless endless sections/flights, everyone gets to participate, might actually get done in the attn span of a regular person etc.

another navy fan wrote:

What do you like?

Dislike?

What would you change about them? Are they good for the sport?

It's a catastrophe for some teams that apparently have 2 dual meets and an invitational in a single week.

My sophomore year of high school, I had a coach who ran me in the 4 x 800m, Open 800m, Open 1600m, and 4 x 400m in 2 dual meets in the same week, and then ran me in those same 4 events at a Frosh-Soph Invitational.

When the Invitational came around, my team managed a win in the 4 x 800m and 4 x 400m purely because of depth, but me and every one of my teammates were off our PRs by a good 5 and 10 seconds in the 800m and 1600m

So dual meets can make for some good runs and workouts, but if your coach really doesn't know how to handle you, they can also screw you over.

Good for college (rilvalries) and some high schools. Problem is some schools are huge, some are really small. The good is everyone competes, the bad is the depth of competition.

Sounds like your state association sucked then. I thought most states had similar restrictions as Washington does, where you can compete in at most 2 meets per week. If your state association doesn't even protect their athletes by limiting that... what good is it?

As for the OP... dual meets are great for competitive leagues, double-duals are better for not-so-competitive leagues. They're great opportunities for everyone to run, and younger kids to get used to the competition, and for the rivalries they can create. If you aren't in a competitive league though, the duals are pretty useless for the more elite athletes that never get any competition out of it. For that reason, teams in weaker leagues especially need to find suitable invitationals to make up for the shortcomings of their duals in order to prepare their athletes for state (or whatever goals they may have).

Good responses.

The reason I ask is that our school is hosting a Friday night under the lights dual meet against our rival. I am excited, the other coaches are excited, our kids are excited.

For the Lehigh Lafayette dual. What makes it unique?

another navy fan wrote:

For the Lehigh Lafayette dual. What makes it unique?

Like many other college long-lasting duals, it's the school rivalries.

Harvard-Yale is a good one. They have head-to-heads in many sports outside of TF/XC. In fact, the highlight of the football season is the HY game. Typically, the team rates their season on if they win the annual rivalry game. Just the mindset of the athletes "my school is better than yours" adds to the intensity of the matchup.

One of the most exciting races I ever saw was the relays at the indoor Harvard-Yale-Princeton meet in 2003. On the women's side, the meet overall title was between Harvard and Yale (Princeton was really far back in the points). In both relays, either Harvard or Yale was cheering for PRINCETON to beat the other team so that they didn't get the points to earn the team title. Yale ended up winning the meet.

Speaking as a Lehigh alumnus...I agree -- proximity, similarity, tradition...

- Lehigh and Lafayette are 15 miles apart.

- They meet in XC, Indoors, and Outdoors.

- They have been staging the meets since 1881, when they held the first NCAA-sanctioned collegiate T&F meet ever.

- They are very similar in size, academic profile, and student demographics/geographics (a couple of HS teammates of mine competed for Lafayette, and against me).

One thing that's probably completely unique is that just for XC and T&F, there is a perpetual trophy, the Bryan Mundy Trophy, which resides with the team with the most recent win (XC, Indoor, Outdoor, men & women). When it changes hands, it's done on the spot right after the scoring is final, in a pretty cool ceremony.

The Trophy is named in memory of my teammate and friend, who got as fired up for the meet as do the athletes on both sides to this day. It's inspiring to see.

Joe does the trophy only change hands for the mens competition? Do the women have there own trophy?

Thats a cool tradition. Similar to the all sorts of football trophies but it makes a few more trips.

The women have their own and it does change hands as well if I remember correctly.

It was a great bonding experience for the team and there were a lot of rituals around the dual. (That trophy has been a silent witness to a lot of ridiculousness)

Love them and I think their disappearance is a real loss for the sport. I'd love to see some sort of NCAA championship be awarded through a series of dual meets run over a span of a month in a format like the basketball tournament's. I'd love to see international cross country and track have something like the Davis Cup where countries run dual meets against each other with the winner advancing to a championship.

Dual meets provide opportunities for everyone in a team to compete. A student body can get excited by a team that does well. Some people have commented about mismatches being a downside and of course they are, but that's an issue with all team sports. How excited are Pitt football fans going to get about this season's game with Gardner Webb?

Interest in the sport has declined as the frequency of dual meets has declined. Maybe just a coincidence, but...

I coach high school XC & Track in a very large urban district. Our "dual" meets are never duals or tri's or anything that small. Our smallest track meet is 6 teams, we have one next month that will have 11 teams. One of the issues is that with the proliferation of charter schools the talent level in the league is so spread that often times many events are worse than jokes, or don't have (m)any competitors. An example was yesterday's meet where the girls 800 had one girl from our team and that was it. It is frustrating.

Another issue for us is that being a large urban district means most of the kids are not distance fans and want to run sprints, so our XC meets are worse than a laugh.

To top it off, all of our "duals" are on Thursdays, which if we weren't trying to run a decent program and expose our kids to higher levels of competition would be fine, but try to run a meet on Thursday and come back and perform well at an invitational every Saturday and you've got problems, especially because the kids want to run on Thursday b/c they know they can win. It is maddening from a training schedule perspective, because kids won't "not race" a race.

The concept is great, but in practice where I'm at, they are poorly planned, thought out, and run.

Love 'em. The kids love 'em. Fans will actually come and watch 'em. (Because, as an earlier poster pointed out, they can relate to the team scoring and can watch the whole thing in a couple of hours.)

I don't have the time or resources to do it myself, but I'd love to see research on whether there's a correlation between the collegiate t&f programs that're dropped and whether they have dual meets. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the programs that get axed are the ones that never have a scoring meet before conference.

One of those special ironies, I guess, but the programs I know that are in *no* realistic danger of being dropped--namely, at the Ivies and USNA/USMA--mostly seem to hold on to their dual/tri meets anyway. HYP? Huge meet. Army/Navy dual meet?--what could be bigger?

I'm an alum of an Ivy school and a Big East school that used to have an annual men's and women's dual meet with each other. I eventually donated a cup that the team with the higher total (men and women combined) score would get to hold for the next year.

The first year of the cup, I attended the meet so I could present it. The meet figured to be a semi-blowout for one men's team, and for the other college's women's team; total score was up for grabs. I knew that the teams were serious when the first event, women's weight (a new event, then), had the maximum entries from each school--with dozens of their teammates hanging on every throw and cheering like mad. They knew that the single point for third place in that event--an event that often has no spectators beyond the coaches, officials, and throwers themselves--could be key.

The total score was tied, or within two points, at more than a dozen places in the meet. Came down to the relays and the vault (only men vaulted, back then). The Big East team had to win three of the four relays to tie the score again, which is just what they did. In the vault, one team took second and third (= four points); the other had the winning vaulter (= five points) and won the cup.

It was a *hell* of an exciting meet. The kids all competed like crazy and cheered like crazy. The team spirit was extraordinary. I daresay that it was even an educational experience (allegedly, all meets are) for some.

You think that maybe that meet did more to build those programs, and to build The Sport, than going to yet another ten-hour, nonscoring invitational--and only competing in half the events because the coaches just want to focus on their specialties? I do.

Dual meets are pretty stupid unless they are between two large teams with many talented athletes in all events. Otherwise you end up soloing the steeplechase or something like that.

kibitzer wrote:

I don't have the time or resources to do it myself, but I'd love to see research on whether there's a correlation between the collegiate t&f programs that're dropped and whether they have dual meets. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the programs that get axed are the ones that never have a scoring meet before conference.

One of those special ironies, I guess, but the programs I know that are in *no* realistic danger of being dropped--namely, at the Ivies and USNA/USMA--mostly seem to hold on to their dual/tri meets anyway. HYP? Huge meet. Army/Navy dual meet?--what could be bigger?

Sadly, more of the Ivy tri's are being dropped as the Ivies are sending more athletes out to distance Invites. There is no longer a Princeton-Penn-Yale tri to my knowledge. There used to be a Brown-Cornell-Harvard for indoor up until 2008 I think (now replaced with the Harvard Select meet and/or the Battle of Beantown). There still is HYP for indoor, Columbia-Yale-Dartmouth for indoor, and HY for XC and outdoor. Usually there are more "tri" meet setups whenever UK collegiate teams come over for their US tour once every four years. I wish the dual/tri tradition was stronger because they are indeed more exciting to follow and get the alumni talking about conference matchups.

Duals would encourage larger teams because there are more opportunities to compete. We had 40-50 guys on our college team in the early 70s. We were just a mediocre College Division team usually running duals and tris against similar competition and every team we ran against had about the same number of athletes.