Rich XC Runners (or why are my teammates so rich?)

It's a white sport. White people tend to be socioeconomically better off.

lol my team raised almost 15k in fundraising. Eat me.

Extracurriculars are important for college applications. Rich parents think their kids need to play a sport. XC is the sport for unathletic kids that can not make the team in any other sport. So XC ends up with all the rich kids that need to play a sport.

Why not just buy the flats and where them for all of your races?

moran

anti moran wrote:

moran

You must be self-despising.

sorry dude but parents as a group being able to scrounge up $5K does not make them rich. that is a tiny amount of money in the grand scheme of things.

I wouldn't buy specific shoes just for one race. Just use XC spikes, but take out the spikes. Issue solved.

A good pair of road flats for workouts isn't a bad idea anyway though.

You may be trolling though. $40-50 for flats? Most are more like in the $70-120 range.

The only things the parents of my HS XC team donated were two pop-up tents, a few tarps, post-race snacks, and food for the end of the season banquet. Probably a total of a few hundred bucks over the course of the two years that I ran XC. Our funding came from the sports boosters, and I don't know how much it amounted to. The team was composed of middle class people. I do know some wealthier kids who ran for other schools though, but I don't know if their parents invested a significant amount of money in the team.

Does your coach have any flats lying around? When I graduated from college I donated my spikes to the program. It might be worth asking.

Racing flats might be a good investment if you get serious about the sport, but then, it's nobody's business how you choose to spend your money.

Good luck at the race.

Genetics and behavior modeling. Distance runners are by their nature people who focus on goal setting, long term planning, delayed gratification and self-discipline. They probably have some of those traits before they get into distance running, and they probably got those traits from their parents. Those traits also tend to be the traits that generally result in economic and academic success. I'd bet that if you compared the GPA of the average cross country team to most other sports teams, at the high school or collegiate level, you would find that it is higher than that of most other sports.

Smoove wrote:

Genetics and behavior modeling. Distance runners are by their nature people who focus on goal setting, long term planning, delayed gratification and self-discipline. They probably have some of those traits before they get into distance running, and they probably got those traits from their parents. Those traits also tend to be the traits that generally result in economic and academic success. I'd bet that if you compared the GPA of the average cross country team to most other sports teams, at the high school or collegiate level, you would find that it is higher than that of most other sports.

Nope. This can't be. Democrats tell me that there are no differences between people. No one works harder than anyone else. Some people are just luckier.

not rich wrote:

sorry dude but parents as a group being able to scrounge up $5K does not make them rich. that is a tiny amount of money in the grand scheme of things.

Yup. And OP, you aren't middle class if $5K seems like a large amount of money.

5/10 for the blue collar troll.

Phil Fondacaro wrote:

Extracurriculars are important for college applications. Rich parents think their kids need to play a sport. XC is the sport for unathletic kids that can not make the team in any other sport. So XC ends up with all the rich kids that need to play a sport.

Don't generalize. It makes you sound dim. Many of us played other sports in addition to cross-country and were quite successful at them. Just because you are unathletic doesn't mean the rest of us are.

pop_pop!_v2.2.1 wrote:

not rich wrote:

sorry dude but parents as a group being able to scrounge up $5K does not make them rich. that is a tiny amount of money in the grand scheme of things.

Yup. And OP, you aren't middle class if $5K seems like a large amount of money.

5/10 for the blue collar troll.

$5k is a lot of money if there are less than 20 kids on the team - 10 per gender. $5k divided among 20-sets of parents is about $250 per set. No way my parents could/would have done that in addition to the other "pay to play" fees mandated by the schools.

The truths of high school xc wrote:..The coach said everyone was required to race it in flats (we have never been required to have flats before)...I of course will run the meet in my regular trainers because I can't justify buying new shoes for one race...

Just buy blanks and change out your spikes for blanks for this race.

d2xccoach wrote:

The truths of high school xc wrote:..The coach said everyone was required to race it in flats (we have never been required to have flats before)...I of course will run the meet in my regular trainers because I can't justify buying new shoes for one race...

Just buy blanks and change out your spikes for blanks for this race.

This is the correct answer. I actually ran in waffles like this quite a bit in high school for practice, etc before I switched to flats.

Are you sure that was the implication of the coach's statement that you should race in flats? Traditionally people use the term "flats" to just mean "not spiked." I've often heard coaches tell their athletes to put on their "flats," when they really just mean "no spikes today."

OP it looks like you are posting from Beaverton, Oregon.

So if you weren't trolling, it would be because the parents of all of the kids on the team work for Nike so they can buy flats an employee discount .