TK1451 wrote:
When another team manages to beat Princeton at Heps they can criticize how Princeton handles their early-season garbage meets.
Boy, this kinda sums up a lot of what's happening in The Sport, doesn't it?
You know what, it *is* disrespectful to give less than your best effort at a meet (unless you know that you can win anyway). But it's not just disrepectful to your opponents (congrats to the Middies, by the way: your team was better than Princeton's team that day); it's disrespectful to The Sport.
Going to meets and not making a full effort to win; even worse (maybe), going to meets and not scoring them: we're just disrespecting our own competitive activity. Do people *seriously* expect casual sports fans, alumni, and college administrators to have more respect for our sport than we seem to?
No, the Ivies and the academies are in no danger of dropping track & field and cross-country running--in part because those schools *do* retain some semblance of head-to-head, meaningful scored contests during the regular season. But can anyone picture a school's basketball team (after the exhibition season) going to a game and "tempoing" through it--having the scrubs play, say, and *knowing* they're going to lose--and the coach then saying, "Well, we have to be ready for the end of the season"? What a horseshit attitude. Congratulations on helping to turn the greatest sport into a competitive afterthought.