Another Men's Track Program Bites The Dust

Not Blind wrote:

Can we finally figure out how to change the Title 9 to not include football? How many men's sports need to get cut before men are allowed to complain without women's activists jumping down their throat?

Fact is, men's sports are not equal to women's. More people watch men's. DOESNT MEAN WOMEN DONT DESERVE CHANCES BECAUSE THEY DO. But it's not equal because of football. Wrestling, swimming and running all suffer because we need to inflate the women's scholarships and participation numbers to cancel it out.

I saw a chart the other day showing the number of participants in college athletics and BY FAR the biggest was football with over 70,000 people participating. That's 70,000 women that need to get a spot on any team (water polo, crew, croquet, etc) before any men can get on any other team throughout the country.

Actually, football tends to be the biggest DRAIN on revenue for about half of all collegiate programs. It isn't the scholarships that are sinking the ship, but the fact that footbal programs tend to require a huge amount of $$$ and few actually bring in enough money to be profitable. It's a total myth that football and basketball programs are the big revenue draws. They may be for some schools, but not nearly as many as folks would hope.

Realistically, those Title IX sports that you're complaining about have much, much smaller budgets, and don't hit the budget in nearly the way to affect the bottom line. For those of you that didn't catch it, St Cloud actually had the option of shuttering it's football team and keeping all of its other sports - the football team that had all of a 6-5 record.

But I forgot, I'm on letsrun.com where all the dudebros like to talk about how the womens are ruining stuff.

Title IX is being used as a scapegoat. They are cutting women's sport and giving the money to Hockey

There seems to be some continued confusion about Title IX. It is not an athletic opportunity program, it is an educational opportunity program. It's most often referenced with regards to intercollegiate athletics, but that's not why it came to be, but it has had a huge impact.

As previously noted, you can't just "forget" football exists. And while it makes sense to cut football scholarships and squad sizes... ITS NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN!

Obviously the problem is Title 9 and its epicene mentality, which soon will banish football as well, with male Quislings from other teams leading the campaign. As I wrote 46 years ago in "Sexual Suicide," feminism will move on from its devastation of marriage and the military to doom college sports. Perhaps club sports, as in Europe, can take up some of the slack.

GG

Mr. Obvious wrote:

Title IX is being used as a scapegoat. They are cutting women's sport and giving the money to Hockey

Here is what I do know. It's common anecdote among many track coaches (yes, male and female) that we're all (from Oregon to BFE U) wasting massive amounts of scholarship on our female athletes...but the less that is completely wasted, the better the program/head coach.

What does this mean? It's very difficult to find women worth actually awarding scholarship money to. Sure we have to so we do...but we know we're throwing much of it away on women who just aren't willing to do what it takes to compete at a high level. They sure are happy to accept the scholarship and turn the program into a sorority however. The best programs figure out how to waste the least (still flushing much of it down the toilet).

Meanwhile we cannot afford to award scholarship to far more dedicated, talented & competitive men who reach much greater levels of success. Cry me a river...I know. The world isn't fair. I explain that to our men all the time...this is good preparation for an unfair world so deal with it. And yes, we have men that piss their scholarship down the drain as well.

But it still gets me every time I have to award large scholarship to several women knowing darn well that many of them will check out the moment they walk in the door. Maybe that makes me a terrible women's coach. But this is VERY common among my colleagues - both male and female.

Oh, and this athletic department isn't cutting the women's track/xc program...why? You get to count those women three times since (if they sponsor indoor) they are technically three different sports. It drives all of us crazy that we have to use accounting tricks to hide our men's numbers & inflate our women's numbers. Title IX is certainly a major culprit.

__________________________

It's one thing to think that the rules and policies that guide college athletics are out of synch with program needs; it's quite another to make sweeping generalizations about athletes based on gender. What does it mean to "turn the program into a sorority?"

I know several people who coach college women, and none of this talk this disparagingly about their athletes. It really begs the question of whether there is something unappealing about your school that keeps competitive women from coming there, whether your recruitment tactics are not up to par, or whether you really are a bad women's coach.

Take note. Young women are not stupid. They can tell when somebody devalues them or is not invested in their success, and this surely affects their chances of being successful. If this is your opinion about women athletes, it's probably time to walk away. Coaching is a two-way street.

Duck Ellington wrote:

St.Cloud sucks . They haven't had a good distance runner in almost 50 years. Drop it, keep it , doesn't matter. Same relevancy.

They had some very good distance runners in the 1980s. Much better than you could dream of being.

10+ year DI Coach wrote:What does this mean? It's very difficult to find women worth actually awarding scholarship money to. Sure we have to so we do...but we know we're throwing much of it away on women who just aren't willing to do what it takes to compete at a high level. They sure are happy to accept the scholarship and turn the program into a sorority however. The best programs figure out how to waste the least (still flushing much of it down the toilet).

Meanwhile we cannot afford to award scholarship to far more dedicated, talented & competitive men who reach much greater levels of success.

Partly you are probably talking about sex-linked characteristics. If you gave out scholarships to the most intense and physically competitive people regardless of sex, you would probably give most of them to men. It's probably the same underlying difference that results in 80% of the people imprisoned for violent crime being men and 20% being women. Young men and young women are just different in that way.

Instead, you have to divide up scholarships between men and women. That doesn't necessarily mean that scholarship money given to less intense or physically competitive women is being wasted or thrown away. If you have a decent program, the women should be getting at least as much educational and character-building benefit from being in it as the men.

Obviously this depends on the metric you are using for success. You can focus on times and places or you can focus on what educational benefits a student is getting from being a student-athlete.

anemiron wrote:

Duck Ellington wrote:

St.Cloud sucks . They haven't had a good distance runner in almost 50 years. Drop it, keep it , doesn't matter. Same relevancy.

They had some very good distance runners in the 1980s. Much better than you could dream of being.

And if those good distance runners from the 1980s cared about their alma mater, they'd still have a team. Instead, the team has been terrible for years, and they finally had a decent up and coming distance coach that might have been able to develop some decent runners.

Many middling DII programs suffer because the coaches were good athletes, but terrible developmental coaches. Kids go DII because they get some ego money, and they should have went to a DIII school that has much better coaching.

CoachJD wrote:

anemiron wrote:

They had some very good distance runners in the 1980s. Much better than you could dream of being.

And if those good distance runners from the 1980s cared about their alma mater, they'd still have a team.

That is preposterous. Your ignorance is astounding.

amanhasnoname wrote:

The problem is football. Why don't schools cut the sport that a) most skews the distribution of participants and b) costs the most money? The answer is "we can't give up football." The problem isn't activists, and it isn't title ix, it's football.

Football is the elephant in the room. At every level football should revert to platoon AKA two-way football. Follow Arena football's example where offense also plays defense. Also, it would cut down on the size of the offensive & defensive linemen.

Bloody ridiculous that a sport like that has to have oxygen tanks on the sideline. Rugby players are laughing at you.

anemiron wrote:

CoachJD wrote:

And if those good distance runners from the 1980s cared about their alma mater, they'd still have a team.

That is preposterous. Your ignorance is astounding.

An active alumni makes a big difference. Especially in retaining good coaching...because the lure of better resources at better programs can disrupt continuity and change the culture of a program quickly. But you have to remember the persona of a kid who gets lured to these lower tier D2 programs...they get a $500 scholarship and think it validates their marginally good ability. You can't build a team with a bunch of kids like that...let alone change a culture of a program. There's plenty of reasons why the D3 school down the road, St Johns, has a better XC and Tnf program, and it begins and ends with the continuity of the coaching staff that develops kids who are there because they enjoy working hard in a team environment.

Liberalism = a mental disorder wrote:

Brain-damaged athletics wrote:

Football is killing the rest of men's college sports.

Guys who who want to play sports but don't like concussions will soon be out of luck.

No, TITLE IX and its assault on the facts of life is killing men's college sports. Football is just a byproduct of that, which was probably intended by the football-hating feminists who pushed Title IX. They want you to hate football, but that's not the real enemy.

Solution: make lingerie football an NCAA sport.

Sucks for them! Can't have it all.

I am surprised their are any track and cross country programs at any universities, as 95% of them are giant money pits. Stop complaining about football until you can outdraw them in attendance, sponsorship, etc. We should be looking for new ways to brand our sport rather than lamenting the passing away of another program. What ideas do you have to increase attendance at college track meets?

joedirt wrote:

I am surprised their are any track and cross country programs at any universities, as 95% of them are giant money pits. Stop complaining about football until you can outdraw them in attendance, sponsorship, etc. We should be looking for new ways to brand our sport rather than lamenting the passing away of another program. What ideas do you have to increase attendance at college track meets?

Greatly restrict competitors and push them into the same races. After one or two early season open meets, if you aren't one of the 2-3 best sprinters/distance/ middle-distance runners on your team, you're not going to the meet, you're going to practice until you can hit goal times in practice that suggest you can challenge your traveling teammates.

If you can't hit a fairly ambitious mark (for example, 4:25 miles @ D3, 4:20 @ D2, 4:15 @ D1), then your team doesn't need to bother sending anyone. And there's only 200, 800, 3k, 4x400m, and TJ at some meets, and 60, 400, 1609, 5k, 4x400, and LJ at other meets. Other field events can go sit in the bleachers and eat like they want to do anyway.

Each race matters more, there's less congestion at meets, and it only takes like an hour to run all the events.

You don't need pole vaulters, their equipment, or their assistant coach. You don't need hurdlers, their hurdles, or their assistant coach. You don't need high jumpers--if they can jump, they can jump against triple jumpers and long jumpers. Don't need throwers, because of the time and room they eat up and how bad they smell, or their equipment, or their assistant coach.

Summary: Teams cost less, track meets are easy to follow, and track meets are shorter time commitments.

I was thinking more along the lines of a DJ booth setup on the infield, cheerleaders / dance team, gear giveaways, gambling, etc. Something to capture the short attention of the millennials.