It's time to have ONE national championship.

George Atlas wrote:

What would be best is if you had the top teams in the country from each region selected and run a team championship the third weekend of November. Just take the top 20 teams in the country after their state meets. Pick them

Then the next weekend have the Footlocker Individual regionals.

Two weeks later have the top individuals race.

That's (essentially) how it was from 2004-2006. Two problems with that, though:

1. Footlocker was no longer going to accept the top 2 NTN finishers from FLW states, and FLW was the same day as NTN

2. The opinion of the rankings committee isn't perfect and sometimes good teams were left at home after NOT having a chance to show how good they were in a head to head matchup with other teams in their region. Take the Heartland for example - if NXN selected teams based on the state meets, the HL#2 team (Edina MN) wouldn't have been invited because they didn't make their state meet (brutal section, they finished third behind HL#1 Wayzata and HL#4 Hopkins)

I was at Footlocker NE in the Pre-Nike days. The meet director told me that Nike proposed a Team Championship and he said no. I told him I thought it was a mistake.

It's time for Footlocker to concede.

Footlocker MAY get some of the best individuals but they lose the team people- the great individuals on teams- Bryce Millar of FM for example.

fandom xc wrote:

I could name around 20 Footlocker champions. I could name maybe 2 NXN team champions and 2 NXN individual winners (Baxter and Efraimson).

I agree with your point, but I can name like 10 girl's team champs - F-M. I can also name Verzbicas on the individual side. That's it though. I could probably name every Footlocker champ.

Isn't is possible for an athlete to run both, or did that change?

Sean McNamara, Kenny Klotz, and Chris Derrick come to mind as top runners who managed to do both successfully.

Until kids can put on their school uniforms to run at NXN its like a glorified USATF or Hershey meet with lots of Nike swag.

McFatty wrote:

stripes of a zebra wrote:

We will have a definitive boys champ - the winner of footlocker. If Anderson chooses not to partake then he is forgoing any claims to the national champion crown.

And if Anderson wins NXN while Dressel wins or is within a few seconds of the win at FL? You're still going to try to tell us that the FL winner is the undisputed champion of the galaxy?

Anderson and Dressel both gave it everything they had at their state meet and Anderson won by a land slide.

Not the undisputed champion of the galaxy - the US high school national cross country champion. It's pretty simple - you can't win the crown if you don't show up. They don't give Jenny Simpson national titles for running well at Mt. SAC; she has to go to the US champs.

As an aside, Anderson beating Dressel at state doesn't assure that he'd beat Dressel at the national championship.

Dr Professor Yoel III Esquire wrote:

I agree, XC is first and foremost a team sport,.

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But...but... but... but.... but guys, the TRADITION!!! Even if it's become completely irrelevant by not offering a team championship. Even though all the recent races have been watered down by top athletes being forced to choose between their teams and individual "glory." Ritz ran there, so we can NEVER change it. We must preserve the history and never move to improve the current system. I mean come on, I can name every individual FL champ ever. That means we have to keep it.

typical head-up-the-butt rnner wrote:

But...but... but... but.... but guys, the TRADITION!!! Even if it's become completely irrelevant by not offering a team championship. Even though all the recent races have been watered down by top athletes being forced to choose between their teams and individual "glory." Ritz ran there, so we can NEVER change it. We must preserve the history and never move to improve the current system. I mean come on, I can name every individual FL champ ever. That means we have to keep it.

Sarcasm is the argument of the weak. Footlocker is the individual championship. It will once again have the runners wishing to vie for that title. If runners feel like they need to choose not to run for the individual championship, that is no fault of FLN.

Crazedseepies wrote:

NXN should really be the only one. The experience is not only fifty times better than Footlocker, but dear heavens. What does Footlocker NOT GET about cross country. It's a team sport. Those regional 'teams' are complete BS.

NXN is the real championships. The best team in the nation wins. If they want to have an individual championship, it IS NOT cross country.

The problem with this thinking is that many individuals come from schools with zero team support. Meaning that you could have one talent running fast, and then a slew of 17-19 minute 3mile runners. So now does that kid have to miss out on a national championship? That's unfair to him. Plus the problem with NXN is you get really terrible runners getting their heads filled with professional running aspirations. the 3rd-7th runners on the last place team will get their heads filled with "I deserve a scholarship at a prestigious D1 school because I competed at NXN.

I ran Footlocker, and some of my best friends ran NXN. I can tell you from experience that Footlocker is MUCH BETTER experience for individuals. Why? Because you only have 80 kids in the nation who are all elite caliber, and you\'re treated like the top 80 kids in the nation. With NXN you\'re just a face in the crowd and an outcast among dozens of super tight knit teams.

What needs to happen is NXN needs to go back to NTN and stop butting heads with Footlocker. When you have team\'s 6th and 7th runners jogging around in the 17:00s, it\'s hard to declare the winner the individual national champion when their competition isn\'t truly the best of the best.

Heck you could solve everything by just making all the regional meets on different days. There are kids who get to run both every year and do very well/

What about 2012 when Wharton won in over 17:00? The whole field must've jogged that year

white not rotate it? Footlocker in odd years Nike in even?

Yeah, I don't see why there can't be a way to have both. Those saying NXN is the true championship because team is paramount, well...I think I can understand the closeness of teams, although I never really experienced it myself in high school, so I know that team bonding is important in cross country. However, this is the way I see it as an outsider, a fan of the sport - I really don't care about the top teams in the nation. I can see how it would be very exciting for the teams themselves, and I don't see a problem with having a national championship meet. But I am much more interested in the individual champion, and much more interested in seeing the great matchups between the top individuals in the nation. It is much better for the sport, in my opinion, to have every top runner competing with each other, so that after an exciting race, a true national champion can be crowned. The only reason, for example, NXN last year was interesting to me was because of the matchup up front on the girls' side. Now, it's possible that those three were easily the best three runners in the nation last year, as they finished way ahead of 4th place, but wouldn't you have loved to see them go up against the top FL finishers like Barrett and DeBalsi?

Another thing to consider, from the fan's perspective of which is more exciting (individual vs. team), I mean, the individual race is much more apparent, more visible. The team race, aside from just guessing about it by trying to find all of each team's runners, can only be followed at each timing mat or whatever. The obvious race is up front for the individual title.

So to sum, I realize that within each team, team bonding is important, but I think fans of the sport care much more about individual champions than team champions...it's just not as exciting.

I know that it's important for the runners themselves who are on strong teams shouldn't necessarily be thinking what the fans like, and for that reason, as I mentioned above, I don't see anything wrong with having a national team championship. But when that national championship takes top-ranked runners away from the true individual championship race, there's a problem. NXN was started to crown a team champion, wasn't it? Go back to that - stop qualifying individuals for NXN. Obviously the qualifying process will have to be modified - so that those runners who are both top-ranked individuals and on top-ranked teams don't have to choose between the two. FL qualifying process is fine, I think. I think perhaps for NXN there should just be the best teams chosen to compete against each other. Some might argue it would be hard to fairly choose the correct teams, but I don't see why if you have a good team, you wouldn't go to competitive meets around the nation to prove you deserve a berth to NXN.

I like what you said, but Nike doesn't want that. They want their national championship to be THE national championship. As much as people on LRC say it, NXN is not yet of the same caliber as Footlocker up front. Fisher was better than Wilmot; Cheserek than Wharton; Cheserek than Futsum; Verzbicas than Lutz; etc. However, Nike has more money and better marketing and swag. In time, they're just going to outmuscle Footlocker, and there will be a single national championship. Until then, give Footlocker its due. Right now, it is the best individual national championship.

But. . . wrote:

I like what you said, but Nike doesn't want that. They want their national championship to be THE national championship. As much as people on LRC say it, NXN is not yet of the same caliber as Footlocker up front. Fisher was better than Wilmot; Cheserek than Wharton; Cheserek than Futsum; Verzbicas than Lutz; etc. However, Nike has more money and better marketing and swag. In time, they're just going to outmuscle Footlocker, and there will be a single national championship. Until then, give Footlocker its due. Right now, it is the best individual national championship.

Except Nike tried to work with FL, not the other way around. Nike wanted a individual and team championship and offered to continue calling it the Foot Locker National Championships, but FL declined.

XC isn't just a team sport any more than tennis is at the HS level. Yet they have individual tournaments.

Footlocker is the individual championship, NXN is the team championship.

The individual winner of the team championship is not the national champion. The winner of Footlocker is.

NXN needs to drop their individual entrants so it is purely a team concept, like it initially was. Sadly, the winner of NXN is just the winner, not a national champion.

runn wrote:

I was at Footlocker NE in the Pre-Nike days. The meet director told me that Nike proposed a Team Championship and he said no. I told him I thought it was a mistake.

It's time for Footlocker to concede.

Footlocker MAY get some of the best individuals but they lose the team people- the great individuals on teams- Bryce Millar of FM for example.

Morons like you have been repeating the same line every single year in the hopes that it will turn out to be true. Admit it, you're shocked that FL hasn't yielded to the Almighty Nike and in fact are easily coming out no worse than a draw with them when looking at multiple years on the girls and boys side since this whole split happened. It goes without saying that FL will easily be the more competitive place to be this year on the guys side for the big dogs.

It's time for Nike and their sycophants to concede that they're not quite as great as they think they are.

A few responses to all of this:

(1) Footlocker Nationals continues to attract top talent. It is still seen as the better individual race. However, the Footlocker Regionals are dying in terms of numbers. The Nike Regionals are better situated for growth and will continue to make Footlocker a tough business model since the regionals are the money maker.

(2) Without a top level sponsor and regional monies, the Footlocker "experience" will continue to decline. Sorry, but it simply isn't the same as its heyday.

(3) One poster was correct that FootLocker had a chance to join the Nike meet. They did work together for a time (albeit a short time). I have a feeling that this subject may arise again once the FL meet director retires.

(4) The NCAA model works to crown both a team title and an individual champion. The Nike model is the same. I am not sure why folks seem to think that the two can't co-exist on the high school level.

Mundys