What is the University of Guelph?

The Guelph men were without their top guy and still got 2nd. Would have won with him. I hear they like to party there.

Top Canadian (CIS) program for XC. I think they have won CIS for women going on 10 years now. Would be competitive in NCAA D1 at Nationals most years - maybe even on the podium. The top girl(k.Allison) made a big jump today. 2nd(Petrick) was at world Junior in Eugene (5000) and has run 16.04 and 3rd(Ayers) was at World Jnr in 1500m final(4.17), 4th (Thompson) is actually a Senior (not Frosh as results indicated) who has run 4.15 and 16.02. Perhaps not the depth of some of the better US schools, but getting closer it seems every year.

Do they operate a scholarship system at Canadian Universities?

Canada? wrote:

Do they operate a scholarship system at Canadian Universities?

Not a structured scholarship system, teams can give unlimited scholarships to my understanding (I may be wrong on this). The scholarships can be allocated as following:

CIS Rules: Up to the cost of tuition. I believe you are still responsible to cover your own rent and other personal expenses here.

OUA Rules (Guelph included): Up to $4000 in assistance.

While compared to Americans we can't really complain about tuition, the irony here is that Ontario has the highest tuition in Canada and in athletics, you are not able to obtain a full scholarship in Ontario.

OUA schools (the conference that Guelph is in) can offer a maximum of $3500 athletic money/year. That said, tuition is only ~$5000 - $6000 per year depending on the program, and many Canadian schools are able to find work-programs that help athletes make money on their erratic schedules.

International tuition for Guelph is still going to be under $19500 USD all in per year for most students.

it's still really cheap wrote:

International tuition for Guelph is still going to be under $19500 USD all in per year for most students.

Which still does make it a bit harder for them to recruit top Americans and Internationals considering they still can only cover $4000 of it. I'm not sure how the rest of Canada has it in regards to International tuition and Athletic Scholarships.

No love for the Gryph's? Small school, low scholarships, great coaching + kids who believe...

The best guy wasn't even there...

The Oregon Ducks of Canada without the Nike money. They attract an insane amount of talent from across Canada. Very well coached.

Bin Der Dun Dat wrote:

The Oregon Ducks of Canada without the Nike money. They attract an insane amount of talent from across Canada. Very well coached.

This^

Best school! I went there. So awesome.

Definitely one of the greatest collegiate teams in North America. Canadian universities don't have much funding. This is why they can't go to all of the big NCAA meets. If they did, they would dominate most teams as well as be a contender for the NCAA D1 Championships.

The are racing at Wisconsin's adidas meet in two weeks!!!!

oh yeah? wrote:

The are racing at Wisconsin's adidas meet in two weeks!!!!

Wait until they have their #1 guy

Bob's your uncle wrote:

Never heard of them before but after this Canadian team's women took down Georgetwon and FSU at Paul Short, I'll pencil them in for a top 5 at Wisconsin.

Going to add a little more in the way of concrete detail here. Guelph has become the go-to school for decent high school runners who want to continue to run at a high level but do not want to go through the NCAA system (for a number of reasons you can probably guess). As some of the other posters have mentioned, Canadian schools do not offer any real scholarship money so its largely made up of Ontario-based runners. For context, Ontario is about 50% bigger than Texas and has a population of about 12.5M people.

However, a lot of their guys are older than most who compete at the NCAA level. Is there even an age limit for Canadian Universities?

oh yeah? wrote:

However, a lot of their guys are older than most who compete at the NCAA level. Is there even an age limit for Canadian Universities?

Not true, all of the girls and guys are of a typical age university age. The oldest girl in their top five is 22, the other four are all 19 or 20. The oldest guy in their top five is also 22.

No age limit. Marilyn Arsenault was a 41 year old frosh.

I "discovered" Guelph in high school. My plan was to go to graduate school or somewhere out west, where international or out-of-state tuition was actually cheaper than east coast schools. I even put "Guelph" as my name on the back of my intramural basketball jersey junior year.

Guelph Gryphons, baby!