BadMoveGuys wrote:
Then why the hell have regular meets at all? This right here is why XC is a crappy sport. There’s one day per year that matters, and people like you try to pretend that’s a good thing.
I guess I should clarify.
As a runner, we only cared about 10 days in November. The regular season meets are warm ups, opportunities to sharpen our legs, get race-ready for conferences, regionals, and nationals. We went plenty of meets--- Lehigh, Griak, Prenats, Penn State, Notre Dame, etc., over the years. We knew that when we got to Regionals, we'd get an auto-qualifier and let other teams worry about their points. We enjoyed the regular season as an opportunity to build confidence-- however racing against EVERY top team in the country at pre-nats wouldn't have helped to build that confidence. This was also earlier in the internet world. There weren't live feeds of races. We read the results after the fact and prepared ourselves to show up when it counted.
As a fan, after graduation, it's a lot more fun to have the top teams racing around the country, then meeting up at pre-nats in separate races to add more fuel to the collective fire of speculation. What could would it do for you right now to watch NAU pummel BYU right now and repeatedly throughout the season? How much fun is that for anyone except NAU?
What do any regular season sports matter? Baseball? Most of those games are meaningless. College Basketball? Just win your conference title and you're moving onto the Tournament and you can win it all or go out right away. Look at UVA last year losing to UMBC. Or the Giants and the Patriots in 2007? Does anyone care what the Giants' regular season was like? I'm sure the Patriots would have rather had the Giants' record and trophy at the end of the season than to be 19-1.
So I guess we'll agree to disagree on this one. And I would never say that XC is a crappy sport, those are your words... and I think it's you and people like you who are the problem, not me. Besides, it was two days that mattered, not just one. wink