Isn't it embarrassing when there are D3 college XC teams that are slower than a decent high school XC team's top 5?

Intramurals XC wrote:

You know and you've seen it - teams with maybe only 5 guys on whole college XC team and their #3 guy is running 32min for an 8K.

Now take a fairly decent varsity XC high school team (with say varsity top 5 of 18min 5k guys average) would be able to beat them ...that's embarrassing. So why do these teams exist?

Why is this embarrassing? Own a dictionary?

So......What's your point?

As a D3 runner many years ago, there were two schools in our conference who routinely fell into this category. Although these two schools never really had much of an official XC program, they would field a team for the conference meet. The conference required all schools to field a team in a certain number of varsity sports in order to remain an active member. Thus, these two schools, without a real XC program, would recruit members of the basketball team or soccer teams to run in the conference and regional XC meet to maintain the school's eligibility within the conference. I suspect this goes on at other institutions around the country and likely explains your observation.

Intramurals XC wrote:

You know and you've seen it - teams with maybe only 5 guys on whole college XC team and their #3 guy is running 32min for an 8K.

Now take a fairly decent varsity XC high school team (with say varsity top 5 of 18min 5k guys average) would be able to beat them ...that's embarrassing. So why do these teams exist?

Sorry you got called out for being a liar.

You're talking about bottom of the barrel D3 schools. Who cares?

If the kids want to run why shouldn't they be able to have a team? Who are they hurting?

Ghrelin wrote:

Sorry you got called out for being a liar.

I've coached in both DIII & DI. We found ways to make it happen in DIII - trust me - and so did our competition. I still recruit against DIII's that figure this out. I'm sure there are exceptions of teams not doing this - of which we may have found two. But it's rife. It was a game to figure out how we could do this better than the other guy...treated it like sport. My time there was good but I got out because I still got tired of the high school mentality and JV atmosphere.

The poster who cites those programs that just field the conference and regional teams per conference requirements reminded me that DI's used to do this before sport sponsorship rules were tightened. Seriously, you'd see "DI's" out there running their basketball and tennis players...these schools still haven't progressed much...

what's fun is looking at DIII results and realizing your NIRCA club team could clean up

Abeyance wrote:

what's fun is looking at DIII results and realizing your NIRCA club team could clean up

No NIRCA team would win DIII nationals

hannsen wrote:

Also there are plenty of people who ran a 505(or 530) mile in HS who could run 70 mpw and still not run much less than 30 min. Just because someone runs a 31 min 8k doesnt automatically mean that they are lazy/dont care etc.

yes some people's only crime is that they chose their parents very very poorly.

I doubt it.

Not saying win nats, but easily clean up some conferences. the top few NIRCA teams have their scorers/top 7 under 25:40

Some high school teams are just well coached and loaded with talent. When Dathan Ritzenhein and Jason Hartmann ran on the same high school team, that was like having two future NBA players on your high school basketball team. I'm sure a high school team with a couple of future NBA guys would beat most D3 basketball teams too.

Ghrelin wrote:

Pope T-Bag II wrote: And don't give us that baloney (a different poster) about DIII having no scholarships, we all know there are ways that most decent programs and many in between can "pull strings" when it comes to "academic" or "involvement" scholarships and not have to play by the same rules that DI schools have to.

Bullshit. People love to claim this happens, but I've never seen any indication that it's common. It's just something people like to think, but any school that does this is violating NCAA rules. They do care about these things, and any school that gets caught cheating on scholarships is going to get some severe punishments.

I know my D3 school didn't have any special dispensation for athletes, and we were nationally competitive in a number of sports.

Nah, mayne. You're wrong. I've talked to DIII coaches who offer "other money" in exchange for commitment. They give money under the pretense of need-based or merit-based scholarships that they can just kinda make up. You can go to a DIII school, and if you're good enough, get all of your books paid for. Or maybe half your rooming. And above all, it really only takes a guy who's run sub 17 with some solid track times (10:00, 4:35, 2:00) to get these offers. After a sophomore year 3200 of 10:25 and Junior year 5k of 16:40, I started getting some e-mails and letters from coaches. That being said, I had decent enough academic credentials that most coaches told me they could convince the school to give me some extra money to attend, as long as I maintained a gpa of 3.4 or something.

What sucks is that it's often not too much. At a school that costs roughly 30k a year, they really only offered like 4k a year to run, with the rest needing to be covered out of pocket/with legit academic or need based scholarships.

I ran for a DIII school and my school did not give a penny towards athletics, but i've heard of other DIII schools in our conference that did give athletic scholarships 'disguised' as "leadership awards," "sportsmanship awards," etc.. But, as you pointed out, it generally is not more than $4-5k which is nothing when you go to a school that costs a small fortune. Hardly a scholarship.

Let's see, went to a DIII school known more for academics than athletics. We were better than average (most years) to fairly good (one year). Our top 5 would go from sub 25 [8K] (maybe one guy every other year) to about 27:00. To make top 7 or 8 you needed to run about 28:00 or faster.

We were usually top 3 or 4 in our conference and top 10-15 in a very deep region. We worked hard, trained hard, but also made a point not to take ourselves too seriously (partied hard). There were no ability based scholarships.

We were pretty sure that some of the other schools in our region did provide some extra financial aid to exceptional athletes. But the line between need, academics, and athletic performance can be fuzzy.

Like I said before, anyone who gives athletic scholarships in D3 is violating NCAA rules regardless of how they try to hide it. It's pretty obvious - they can just look at the percentage of your athletes getting aid and their high school accomplishments.

A school near me got caught giving some baseball players fake academic aid, and their whole athletic department was put on probation.

Ghrelin wrote:

Bullshit. People love to claim this happens, but I've never seen any indication that it's common. It's just something people like to think, but any school that does this is violating NCAA rules. They do care about these things, and any school that gets caught cheating on scholarships is going to get some severe punishments.

I know my D3 school didn't have any special dispensation for athletes, and we were nationally competitive in a number of sports.

I went to a competitive D3 school. Graduated 10 years ago. When my initial financial aid package arrived, I called the coach and told him I couldn't afford the school and that I had to go somewhere else. He gave me a name and a number and told me to call it in a little bit. When I did, I magically had another $10,000 per year in my package. But I'm sure this had nothing to do with sports. Just a coincidence.