You aren't getting it. "Close to 100%" is not the same thing as "100%." I didn't say it is 100%. You are nitpicking something that was never said. If you can find 10 runners, male and female, who continued in the sport long term, that is still close to 100%. I would put it at around 90-95%. I consider that close to 100%.
This isn't a Guelph-only problem. This is a problem you'll find in all of North America. Schools take in all of the top talent and by the time they're done with them almost all of them have lost interest in continuing. If I saw 5 graduate each year and even 2-3 of them continue in the sport for another 10 years, I would consider that an extremely successful program at this point. Much more successful than I consider anything in Canada.
We always hear about how distance runners hit their physiological peaks in their mid-to-late 20s. But if 95% of the top runners quit around ages 20-21, they have not even come close to developing fully. So how can we say a program has "strong senior development" when no one's developing those seniors they're producing?
This is the difference between there being no one at the Ontario Senior XC race and there being 500, or 1000 in each race, which I think would be far better for the sport in the long term than sending one or two athletes to the World Doping Championships. Say there are 15 universities and colleges with distance programs in Ontario, and there are 10 graduates from each of those schools each year who competed for those schools, 5 of each gender. This is 75 men and 75 women each year. Over the course of the 8-9 years it takes those athletes to reach early master's running at age 30, they would compete in the Ontario Championship. So 9 years from now there are 650 women in the race instead of 23, or maybe there are 700 men instead of 34. Not to mention all the people who get cut from teams, or who never even try out but who ran in high school.
The reason I pick on Guelph/SR specifically is because so many people think so highly of them, so they get to be held to a higher standard. They get a lot of the top talent. And they get aren't doing a good job of keeping that talent healthy and in the sport in the five years they have them. I expect better of them because I'm told to expect better of them. I expect better of the rest of the programs too, but nobody's going around claiming those other programs are the future of the sport, or handing them funds their athletes didn't earn the selection points for, or sneaking things through selection committees when they didn't earn it.