Let's talk bottom-line here, how much $$$ would it take to set up a non-USATF, professional, regional track league?

$$$ would it take to set up a non-USATF, professional, regional track league? $10,000,000

Freedom from old men who like to look at young men in split shorts? Priceless

I can't edit my post, but I meant to say:

3-4 quad meets per WEEK! Teams could rest guys so they aren't running every meet, which would inject some strategy into the league.

This would require a bit more funding, but there would be more gates to increase revenue.

lol, $40K? More like 20-25k

I'm a professional track athlete. Why would I give up the freedom to be coached by whom I choose, to train where I choose, to compete where and when works best for me, for this?

The only reason I, as a professional track athlete, would sign up for this league, is if I stand to make more money in the league than I do as a world or Olympic Champion. Do I? Undoubtedly, my performances will suffer. Instead of receiving the coaching that's worked well with me up to this point, and training in a great place like San Diego, I'll be coached by someone who may ruin me, and I'm suffering through the Northeast or Canadian winters.

I also can no longer pick my own competition schedule, can no longer have my previous shoe company sponsor (since I'm wearing the team uniform now) and can't make the decisions that are best for me for performing at my best. The world championships can't be my focus because if they were, I'd pick and choose my competitions to put me in the best position to set personal bests and perform well at that point in the season, instead of during this club season.

Also, I'm no more valuable (and possibly less valuable to you) than anyone else at a relative ability in their event. I could be the best miler in the world, but I'm still only going to get you 10 points, while a Christian Taylor can score in the long and triple jump. Ryan Whiting can get you 10 points in the shot and maybe a few more in the discus.

So you would have to pay me enough to give up the Olympic and World Championships. For a 1500m runner that has no hope of ever making it big, that's probably affordable. If I'm a star like Kirani James, it's probably $5 million per year. If it's Bolt, start at $30 million per year. And that's just their salary. You want them to run as fast as they can? You better put up performance bonuses. If we want to win meets, a first place in 20.20 in the 200m is just as much a first place as a 19.20.

jewd wrote:

lol, $40K? More like 20-25k

Even better! Again, the start-up cost is downright measly, right?

These athletes would be free to be sponsored by Nike or whomever outside of their contracts.

Imagine 30-50 top collegians and post-grads signing 20k deals each year. That would be fulfillment of the ultimate dream for many of them, unlike the current system where those outside of the top 5 are forced to hang them up or live in poverty.

The phenoms and big personalities would be able to secure endorsements a la RGIII in the NFL.

Lenny Leonard wrote:

3-4 quad meets per WEEK! Teams could rest guys so they aren't running every meet, which would inject some strategy into the league.

Negative. Novel idea, poor approach and a weak understanding of life. 3-4 meets per week would never be sustainable. Your weekly operating costs quadruple without increasing your fan base--you'd merely spread the same amount of fans out over the four days. You're also failing to consider how much team travel costs. 3-4 quad meets would bankrupt your teams in no time. And what venues?

Your best bet would be to take an existing program, such as the NLL (Nat'l Lacrosse League). The NLL reported an average base salary of $19.6K in 2012. They run a 16 game season over 3 months, 8 home and 8 away.

That being said, none of this would ever work. Negative.

This is a ridiculous suggestion. There are thousands of ways to fundamentally change our sport for the good, and this is about number 99,000.

$40k/year for athletes?! If people could acquire enough sponsorship money to pay $500k-1.5M/year just in athlete salaries then we wouldn't be in the situation the sport is in.

10-16 clubs holding 3-4 meets per week, with 4 teams per meet for 3 months...let's do the math... 12 clubs, 3meets, 4 teams, 12 weeks... thats 36 meets! Where in the world are you going to find the money and venues for 36 meets? Or the interest? Where's the revenue in that? USA can't even get a crowd for a Diamond League meet in the greatest sports city in the world!

Let's not even get into the fact that if you have 10-20 athletes and 36 meets you're essentially asking athletes to race a minimum of weekly, which is still 12 times in 3 months! Did you even think of what you were typing when you posted this?

I won't go on, but I will say that there are groups of smart people getting together to keep US athletes competing in the US and provide good opportunity for a payday while keeping fans engaged. Let them handle it. Innovation is happening, sorry it's not a radical coupe of our NGO, but change is happening.

Great points!

Here are my thoughts on this: I think our sport puts too much importance on the World Champs and the Olympics. It pains me a little to say it, but outside of me and a few of my close friends, no one knows or cares who Kirani James is.

Why have track athletes become such prima donnas when they have achieved nothing close to celebrity status? Lebron James, possibly the greatest athlete of all time, did not get to choose where he played professionally at first. Why should some 21 year old 4-minute miler get special treatment? I would personally also be fine with less emphasis on winning times. In baseball and basketball, people accept that players aren't in peak condition at the beginning of the season, but managers and coaches still use strategy to get wins in those early contests. The idea of peaking could still be applied to the club format, and assuredly once in a while, someone will knock a performance out of the park and put up a stellar mark.

We need to stop considering anything less than a WR as lacking entertainment value. Seeing 10 guys go into the bell lap and running a 53 to close a mile is exciting whether the winning time is 3:53 or 4:05. ESPECIALLY if you have a rooting interest in the team.

To use another sport as example, if San Diego is supposedly such a paradise of sport training, why does Green Bay always perform better than the Chargers in football.

So this set-up may not be for the top 5-10 guys in their respective events, who would roll the dice and attempt to medal at the Olympics. It is about making stars (and I mean household names, not Leo Manzanos that NO ONE outside of track has heard of) out of the dozens of guys who would otherwise have to give up on their dreams. I truly believe that the sport would be more popular, and eventually there would be more money AND more glory to be had in winning the yearly championship than there is winning even Olympic gold.

A few things to chew on for you:

Say you're a resident of Miami and a Lebron James fan, does it mean more to you that he goes to the Olympics and wins gold, or that he won your city a title? How do you think Lebron would weight the two?

Lenny Leonard wrote:

These athletes would be free to be sponsored by Nike or whomever outside of their contracts.

Why would they make any money from a shoe company if that company has no control over their uniform?

Out of all the 1432 active NFL players in a given season, how many do you see in shoe ads? Ad them up, I'm sure it's not even one per team. But since the league minimum for a rookie is $375,000, most of those 1432 are doing just fine and can live with the fact that they're not big enough of a name to appear in an ad.

Team sports are different animals than individual sports. Are you, as a distance runner, going to run just as well under Brooks Johnson as you would under Jerry Schumacher?

No one's going to complain when a mile race is won outside of five minutes?

Football is not track. How much outdoor work are American football players doing? Conversely, are there any professional sprint groups based anywhere year round somewhere that deals with a serious winter? You might as well ask why the Bruins play better than the Coyotes despite the blizzards in Boston.

Why wouldn't number twenty in the world try for the Olympics? Why not number thirty? That's where the money is. Is there any scrappy 800m runner in America that doesn't dream about shocking the world a la Peter Snell?

How about this: midway through the season, an athlete gets traded. What happens to his training program?

We need to ask ourselves why this is. $1.5M is not that much money.

We all know the Diamond League system is not a draw for the casual fan. No one in NYC cares about seeing a 5K with one American who gets 9th place.

I believe they would care if you had a dozen guys who live and train in your city who are running with your city's name on their singlet. In time, a chance to see a superstar from another club would be a draw as well. With a quad meet set-up, each venue would end up hosting 2 or 3 meets a season, logistically, that's very doable.

I would imagine most athletes would take 1-2 meets off per month. So they would end up racing 6-8 times over 3 months. I consider that reasonable. If we can expect such performances from "real" sports, why should track be any different?

Well, they are doing a crap job of it. And I honestly don't think they care about making sure that the 30th best US guy has a chance to make it as an athlete. I don't see why the 30th best 3rd baseman in America makes $1mil or so a year, and we can't find $20k to pay a 13:50 5K guy out of college.

Alan Webb ran better under Scott Razcko than he did with Salazar and Schumacher. Talent is talent. If teams had similar resources, the coach is more there to not screw them up, not necessarily making them into something more than they are.

I would definitely complain! but the idea of that is ludicrous. I think at worst you would see the occasional 4:15 winning time, but the last lap would be exciting and I would still cheer.

Teams would have to get creative for sure, but I wouldn't get hung up on climate.

They dream about it because there is no other option for them. The Olympics is the only way that a track athlete can make a name for himself, and even then that is damn near impossible. This would be an alternative for the top-30 guy to call himself a "champion" in the real sense, and get paid in a way that would allow him to train appropriately.[/quote]

Two thoughts on this: First, I don't think training methodologies are SO different that an athlete's year would be sabotaged by changing coaches. Second, supposing you are correct, I think the management of the clubs would acknowledge this as well, and it would deter them from wanting to trade for an athlete mid-season, as they would be worried about that athlete's performance slipping with the new coaching.

Most professional athletes in the NBA, NFL and MLB don't get that kind of sponsorship money. They make healthy six and into seven figure salaries because their sports sign billion dollar television contracts, the proceeds of which are divided between the team owners and the players.

Why is this about Americans? Mariano Rivera got a huge ovation the other night without being American.

How do you make them compete? What if they're staving off injury, tired, or don't think a competition that day is right for them?

Because television networks pay billions of dollars to televise thousands of baseball games every year. You might say that television networks spend billions of dollars to show the Olympics, but that's once every four years and deals with thousands of athletes with huge start up costs each and every time.

But doesn't this go against your point? Nike pushed him to their in house coaches and he didn't perform to his previous standards, as he had under his own, independent coach.

Remember the women's indoor mile at the US Championships? Or the men's 5000m in Des Moines this year?

Don't you agree that the reason all the top sprint groups in the world either train in tropical or subtropical climates or at least winter in warm weather locales is because year round warm conditions are ideal for their training?

If you can get a several hundred million dollar per year television contract, then yes, this is it.

I think you would do better to look at golf and tennis, two individual sports that receive a lot more attention in the US than track. But even within those, there's at most, a fraction of the number of competitors that we have at a track meet and to help the unsophisticated viewer, they're all doing the same thing (which is why road racing is more palatable in this sense).

Do you think Seb Coe would have run just as well had he run for anyone else? I don't. As talented as he was, he and his father made the perfect combination.

Jeff Wigand wrote:

Do you think Seb Coe would have run just as well had he run for anyone else? I don't. As talented as he was, he and his father made the perfect combination.

Wigland - you miss the point. Nobody claims this will lead to peak performances. NBA players would probably play better if they only competed less often - but they are trying to be financially viable.

The proposed system is about trying to allow for frequent competition at a lower standard than the OLY games and create excitement. Is Rob Finnerty going to turn down 40k/year for a 'shot' at OLY gold? Maybe or maybe not. You might be shocked at how little there is for runners of that calibre (3:38 = free shoes, MAYBE).

This would probably remove a lot of the Africans from the collegiate system from the distance events.... they'd go straight to the pro teams, but, would fans be interested in this pro-format... I like the concept with have teams competing against each other, but, you'd also need to have a playoff(regional) and championship at the end, basically adopt the current NCAA outdoor structure with the East and West Regional, and have individuals move on, the team with the most individuals at the championship would have the best shot at winning the team title and have $$$ awards for the winners or for the top 3 $5k, $3k, $1500($50k,$30,$15,000 when it becomes popular and profitable), and the winning team gets a bonus of $250k to $1mill to spread among the staff/ athletes for winning the team title. With the current USATF structure you can use a time from a year ago to go to the USATF Championships, put the athletes in the pressure situation to make the American Pro Track & Field Championships just like NCAA D1 is currently for outdoor track.

no ones going to watch or enter this. What they need is a short distance competition league 40 yards and 100 yards and a 40x4 relay competition. Teams of 10 and they can recruit etc. That way people that watch football can correlate with the times. NFL and track athletes can both enter. Run a series of meets then the top qualifying times go to the championships and run for medals. This would generate more money and sponsorhip than any track event and be a lot more entertaining to watch. No one wants to watch shot put or distance running its boring to people outside of track that's why athletes don't get paid big bucks in track

not about the face wrote:

Wigland - you miss the point. Nobody claims this will lead to peak performances. NBA players would probably play better if they only competed less often - but they are trying to be financially viable.

The proposed system is about trying to allow for frequent competition at a lower standard than the OLY games and create excitement. Is Rob Finnerty going to turn down 40k/year for a 'shot' at OLY gold? Maybe or maybe not. You might be shocked at how little there is for runners of that calibre (3:38 = free shoes, MAYBE).

I know how little there is for someone who isn't expected to make the standard. I'd give shoes to a 3:38 guy.

But without a multimillion dollar television contract to fund the big leagues to fund the minor leagues, I don't see how it can happen.

Completely disagree. NCAA has it all wrong. It is not at all a team championships but nearly completely individual. There are many events that have no barring on the team title whatsoever. 1 athlete (Sam Chelanga) can place 10th as a team. No way is Libertu a better team than Wisconsin! The entire team would qualify out of the regionals into a final four national meet. The winning team gets major $$$ to split amongst team with other 3 getting smaller cuts. Now that would be exciting! And a a former top 30 guy out of college, I would be all for Lenny's system!