Camillus NY - After the success of Jim Vermeulen's XC Journal
in the many falls of Cross Country, we've asked again for him to
provide some news and notes once a month this winter. Think of these as
the thoughts that cross the mind of your average coach. Up from Section
3, we present you with "Thoughts From Three."
Our Inconvenient Truths
I love track & field. My affinity began when I failed into the sport following a distinctly mediocre freshman season of baseball with the Pioneers of Somerville High School. My sister's friend, Jack Reynolds, talked me into trying it after she told him I'd done well enough in an elementary field-days race(2nd in the 600 yard run). I've been in his debt ever since.
Track led directly to cross-country, and because our school in the late sixties had a new teacher with a lot of enthusiasm and skill, my senior year I joined our fledging indoor track program. Robert Ashton, a former NJ AAU cross-country champion, knew his stuff. We did sprint-intervals in the cold school parking lot out back, ran the roads up into the Watchung Mountains, and even bussed occasionally to Rutgers University to train on their outdoor banked wood track--11 laps to the mile. That inaugural team went 3-1, with one 'indoor' meet held outdoors in sub-freezing weather. Coach Ashton put five of us, myself included, in the state championship that season, where my friend Al French placed 4th in the hurdles.
Through college and a teaching career, with mountaineering and skiing fascinations along the way, I've always self-identified first as "a runner." Within the past and present track & field communities, though, that only makes me very ordinary. Many other coaches--and of course team members--make that same primary affiliation. Despite the continuing low public profile of track & field in the U.S., despite the antiquated fiscal frugality mindset that limits our scholastic sport to two levels while most others have three or four, despite lopsided per/athlete school budgets, despite the typical track-comes-last mentality when scheduling stadium uses, despite all that, we love our sport and so we plug along, always attempting to do right by the athletes while raising the perceived presence and importance of track and field.
But by that same turn, however, myself and others are continually mystified as to why our favored sport continually condones or ignores basic problems with itself--self-inflicted wounds if you will. The list of problems is longer, but for starters here are two.
Stunting the Sport
Or
What Drives Track & Field Popularity Is Not 'Winning'
Each spring, when my girls outdoor track team reports for its first practice, the ranks are swelled by the 30-40% who, according to our pre-season questionnaire, have either done nothing aerobic that fall/winter(unless you consider marching band aerobic) or who have no previous team sports experience. I am allowed to take a few deep breaths and roll my eyes. We all do, but then we go about the job of trying to keep those individuals from injuring themselves while developing their fitness and figuring out who has potential in what areas. And that is what my BOE contract, renewed annually, tells me to do. Winning the league or sectional championship is only considered a 'job target.' Running a successful program for all involved--not half of them, not two thirds--is what I'm actually hired to do.
And there is logic in doing exactly that--a basic reason for trying to make it successful for the greatest number of those who walk in the door on Day 1. The reason is cultural. To state the obvious, Track & Field is not the marquee sport in most school districts. Hardly anyone gloats over--and fewer still swear at--our competition records. And while scholastic Track & Field has lost some of its traditional anonymity, it is nonetheless confounding that a sport--Outdoor Track--which involves the most girls participants and the 2nd most boys participants in the United States still remains an afterthought for the common spectator who'd rather show up at a basketball, baseball or lacrosse game.
Unless or until that changes, we'd do well to appreciate the reality that our fan-base grows--if it grows at all--by word of mouth. A successful T&F experience by one newbie will usually add parents and relatives as supporters and maybe even precipitate a sports change by a friend languishing on another team. It's a slow, grass-roots approach, and probably the only one available that we control. Kids in my district grow up dreaming of stepping out onto the varsity lacrosse field someday. That program, with multiple state championships, can allow itself to be selective if it wants to. My track programs don't present that option. Promoting personal excellence on all talent levels is the program prerequisite for creating a sport that athletes might consider for the first time--and then stick with.
The ugly alternative--"weeding out"--is self-defeating. Once, at a track meet, I was talking to a coach with a tendency to focus mostly on his better athletes. I asked him about his apparently reduced team size that season. He nodded toward some JV-level athletes warming up and said quietly, so as not to be overheard, "I wouldn't mind if it was smaller."
Smaller by one coach would help, I was thinking.
In 2004, the Josephson Institute of Ethics conducted a Sportsmanship Survey of scholastic athletes and offered the following statistic: "72% of both males and females say they would rather play on a team with a losing record than sit on the bench for a winning team." While we are lucky to lack the benches(and team cuts) of the rectangle sports, that sentiment expresses the point: winning counts for less than meaningful participation or time engaged in the particular contest of that sport. For many of our team members, it's not dreams of glory(i.e. winning); it's dreams of competence, of improvement, of mastery. This is not to suggest that we run fun-teams devoid of standards and targeted hard work. Coaches can be loyal to athletes at the same time they are loyal to the sport. It may take more work, but due to its organization and structure, T&F is in a unique position to realize the dreams of a lot of scholastic athletes if it wants to. Make it more successful and meaningful for all involved and see how 'popular' the sport becomes.
The Meets Are (still) Too Long
We tend to judge our public exposure by the faces of our big meets. State championships, Armory invitationals, Reggie Lewis Center elite-field races--these high glitz, media-saturated events with their raucous crowds make us look pretty exciting during the indoor months. Outdoor track & field serves up more of the same in bigger venues and (slightly)better weather.
The real face of track & field, however, shows itself at the smaller scale of local meets and venues. Those are the places where, during Indoor, the parents and relatives of Johnny or Suzie squeeze into available floor space outside turn 1 or lean against the upper balcony railing for hours on end to watch their neophyte's brief moments of effort below. If they are lucky, they have the order of events and maybe a scoreboard that will flash the results of each contest. During the spring months, those same fans either huddle under blankets and umbrellas or bake beneath a merciless sun to witness similar brief attempts at personal excellence. Neither spectator experience compares with the luxury of seats at a basketball, swimming or volleyball game--or the comparative solace that a cold baseball or lacrosse contest will at least follow a predictable countdown of innings or minutes.
We too often torture our fans, turning meets into endurance contests for spectators.
"Four hours max," Coach Smith insisted to me adamantly. We were discussing his favorite topic: meet management--or lack thereof. We had both been to huge contests like the Penn Relays, as well as to small upstate invitationals run largely by coaches. Both had possessed the same desired quality: they ran quick. The desirability of speed is not limited to the track or the long jump runway. We agreed that faster meets are almost certainly better meets. Better for the athletes, better for the coaches, better for the spectators. And since no one at a track meet is paid by the hour, one has to wonder: why do so many of them run so slowly? Why do we have to continually stage these fan-killers?
[insert pet peeve here]
I have more than one, but my favorite meet peeve concerns the racer who finishes 2-3 laps down in a distance event, slowly plodding the final solitary meters around the track, then finishing to the polite applause of fans and fellow athletes alike. My reaction is always the same: someone needs to take that athlete's coach aside and ask: Why? Why would you put that athlete on the track, slowing the meet and subjecting him/her to suspect applause? Why would you not improve your training techniques instead? Why, if nothing else, could you not find a shorter--or JV--event for that athlete? It is a fact that some coaches have actually sacrificed slower athletes to 'stretch out' a meet for their double-back athletes. Those aside, every time we add minutes to a meet this way with even the best intentions, it's just another reminder of how our sport needlessly shoots itself in the foot.
Coach Smith is right about speeding up meets to make them more exciting for fans and more productive for athletes. He took the time to so some research on length of scholastic sports contests. Though unofficial, the results point a finger. The National Federation of High Schools issues its annual sports participation statistics categorized by both number of teams nationwide and, more importantly, number of participants. For boys, the #1 sport for participants is Football. The average length of a football game, according to Coach Smith's research, is 3-3½ hours. Most of the other top-15 most popular sports come in well under that time for a contest, with a boys baseball game, for instance, typically lasting 2-3 hours, and a tennis match going 1½ to 2 hours. Swimming and outdoor track both average at least 3 hours but can balloon upward depending on the type of meet. The outlier is an Indoor Track meet, which on average takes at least 4 hours to complete and can stretch, as we know, apparently toward forever. That also holds true for outdoor track invitationals. For both of our sports contests, Coach Smith could find no consistent upper limit.
We've simply grown too accustomed to that length, which is a mistake. A faster clerking procedure here, better entry decisions by coaches there, fewer--or rotating--events at local or section meets, even just a sense by meet management to 'move things along' with more urgency. Any or all of these would improve our protracted contests.
The athletes would thank us. The spectators would thank us even more.