Thoughts From Three: For What It’s Worth

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. Think of these as the thoughts that cross the mind of your average coach. Coach Vermeulen is also the recent author of The Middle Distances-Running Seasons and the Wildcats of West Genesee High School. 

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I
Style and Substance - Another Glance

I have previously suggested the value of viewing our sport as composed of Style and Substance elements. It's a kind of shorthand for all the current dynamics of the sport, one that helps distinguish between flash and foundation. When we talk about the substance of scholastic cross-country, we are describing those elements that create the basic structure and goals of the sport as practiced and contested. Those structures and goals are historical; they are an invented social construct; no one simply 'discovered' the sport of cross-country. We intend certain things to happen certain ways. For example, our competitors race each other - and are scored - as teams. They also do this over 'natural' terrain. If you take away either of those elements (competing as teams, racing natural terrain instead of on tracks or the infield of a horserace stadium) then you have something other than cross-country. It's not what was intended, and those experiments in changing the sport usually don't last. In that sense, the basic substance of our sport is obdurate, and it provides the foundation upon which the sport's traditions are forged.  

Substance elements matter. They are required, even if they may be modified. In 2020, we lost our sectional, state and Federation championships due to Covid. What we did not lose was the need for proper summer training if you wanted to be competitive in the local league meets allowed. The values we typically ascribe to our sport - physical and mental effort, persistence, sacrifice, comradery - all those stem from honoring and practicing the basic substance of the sport, in other words, from mastering what is fundamentally required to be a competent cross-country runner. 

Contrast that with style elements. These are elements that have been 'added on' to the sport.  Some of those add-on's make sense. Most agree that F.A.T. timing, scientifically engineered trainers, and advanced fabric clothing for the vagaries of training and racing weather have improved the athlete's pursuit of the sport.  Other style elements, though, have brought mixed results. Development of the internet spurred the rapid expansion of social media. Private lives can now be offered up for public consumption, and, for our sport, largely localized sports have given athletes and teams a regional, state-wide or national presence. That wide-ranging dispersal of athlete/team information created marketing opportunities that were quickly seized. State and national rankings of athletes and teams, enormous data-bases of cross-country information, instantly available competition results from wherever, live-streams of meets - all encouraged a steady creep of commercialism down into the scholastic ranks for the simple reason that the style elements of any sport invariably aim to improve marketing opportunities and increase public appeal. It is hard to imagine any accomplished scholastic team in this day and age turning down media opportunities to advertise themselves. You have to look very hard for any teams that want to pursuit their scholastic sport in relative local anonymity or, as John Jerome once put it, to "try to run for the running." 

Style elements, to be sure, can be fun and rewarding for the athletes who are highlighted. Most of the time, however, most of the athletes are not. The style elements of a sport typically advertise the elites of the sport, with the expectation that the other 95% become willing consumers of what's being sold or publicized. While the substance elements of a sport are available to all who wish - or are allowed -- to invest themselves, the style elements, except in vicarious fashion, are not. When coaches make decisions about how to conduct the sport for young athletes, it's important to know the difference between style and substance. 

II
Going Into Our Sport - The Door

Sandy is lacing up her trainers for a run. It's a comfortable, early-July morning, but she wants to get going because the temperature is predicted to rise rapidly. A lot can be said about all the voluntary training that coaches like myself promote before the first official team practice in late August. We often remind the athletes to think of summer as a season unto itself, a critical prelude: you must win the summer if you expect to win in the Fall.  And Sandy has decided to be part of that thought because she wants to be a better competitor this season, to feel more of a contributor in whatever way possible and to enjoy the respect of teammates that comes with it. She does not, however, have to worry about being first selected by a coach to be allowed to accomplish those things. That gate-keeper mechanism of many sports at the varsity level --  3-day tryouts, the objective and subjective methods of evaluation, the benevolent and courteous directives for dismissing those not wanted - all have been removed. Cross-country is a no-cut sport. 

Cross-country is referred to as a power-and-performance scholastic sport. All of those other power-performance scholastic sports - soccer, lacrosse, baseball, basketball, etc. - are arranged around the same paradigm. That paradigm, besides aggressive athlete vs. athlete behavior, is the gradual grade by grade winnowing of the less athletically gifted to arrive at the most talented group of varsity athletes a school can put on the field or in the batter's box. This process fits the definition of a meritocracy, and we have decided, in our American culture, to present it as such.  The power-performance paradigm in most sports expects the less-talented who can't 'make the cut' to simply become dependable spectators and cheerleaders, their only available way to 'stay in touch' with a sport they love. And the power-performance paradigm, when enforced on the scholastic level, creates the dynamics for the statistics we would rather ignore or dismiss. Says one: "studies have found that 70% of children quit sports by age 13, and by age 14 girls quit at twice the rate of boys." Some of the quitting is voluntary, but a lot is not. 

Sandy and her sport, though, are the fly in the ointment of that smoothly conceived sports paradigm. Most can't identify when or why the powers-that-be made cross-country a sport without cuts, but that is what we have. You would think the no-cut policies of cross-country and track would draw favor and support for the democracy of opportunity they present, but the power-performance sports ideology has a firm grip on the American psyche. The athlete attrition that is achieved seasonally through a competitive evaluation process actually elevates the status of its survivors. They become symbols, a social standard for merit, one that track and cross-country violate each season. Some results of our rebel open-door policy are predictable. Years ago, Ron dutifully served his school suspension after he punched out a kid near the school cafeteria. Put him down with a 1-2 combination. That bully who invoked the status quo had been harassing him for days with remarks like, "yours is not really a sport," and "running is for sissies," until Ron finally lost it. When he returned to track practice, Ron apologized for his lapse in judgment, but not before telling me straight out: "I had to defend us, coach." 

No one should have to defend themselves for the desire to develop athletically, but if 45% of girls by age 14 abandon sports due to low body confidence (another statistic), something is wrong with our scholastic sports system. Cross-Country and Track, at the very least, do not have to add to that dismal statistic. Coaches can (and many do) clearly communicate that no-cut means an open opportunity for all those willing to make the investment. 

Think of this one other way. The nineteenth century English philosopher, John Mills, conceived his classic Greatest Happiness Principle, also known as Utilitarian Theory. It is familiar to most of us, in brief, as striving toward the greatest good for the greatest number. That principle should be re-worded by us to argue that the greatest value principle of a scholastic sport is not realized when we only extol, and perseverate on, the exploits of the most talented. The greatest value of a sport for the greatest number of young athletes is realized by spreading out the benefits of sports to as many athletes as possible - and for as long as possible. Think of a no-cut scholastic sports paradigm, and you can already hear the uproar of dissent. You can picture the angry insistence of rectangle sports coaches that you cannot possibly coach manageable (and winning) scholastic teams without cuts. And then imagine the momentarily perplexed looks when you tell them it's already being done by us in every season, every year. Cross-country coaches prove you can walk and chew gum at the same time. It takes extra effort and attitude, but they support and develop both the great and the average athletes alike.  If need be, I can have Sandy explain how that works. 

III 

Coming Out of Our Sport - Value Added

Sandy did not make it to cross-country sectionals. There's that 10-person sectional squad rule, one whose origins are also basically unknown, but which is defended by most as being "reasonable." It's not reasonable to Sandy, who worked so hard all summer and then during the official season. Sandy might ask if that rule is chiseled into a tablet somewhere and why can't it be twelve? That way, more athletes could share the benefits of the sport for a little longer. The NO-birds, like crows in the trees, would cackle but that's-the-way-we've-always-done-it, alarmed by the thought of considering something different, something ever so slightly more inclusive. Convention is always a vague defense of rote method. Or the 5-person rule for scoring, Sandy might ask. Who decided that number instead of seven or ten so that more athletes could make critical competitive contributions to their teams? 

Fortunately, in our sport, that greatest-value idea can be demonstrated by presence versus absence. Coaches can simply go back to their attendance records, and pick a three or four year stretch that was not affected by Covid. Follow a chosen freshman class up through its seasons, taking note of how many are still there as seniors. Then, coaches should take special note of those who, in those years, were never team top-10 runners. There -- you have identified those athletes who might well have been cut from other sports and who, clearly, had found our sport enjoyable and rewarding enough, not for its rankings, not for its championships, or win/loss records, or personal interviews, but for its substance, what the sport was meant to be from the beginning. If you have no athletes of that status, no 'JV runners' who capped three or four years of the sport with a rewarding senior season, you might want to ask yourself why that happened, why you lost them somewhere along the way.  

I have always liked a coaching colleague's statement, where he said, "Sports is not about winning; it's about performing." That's the substance of a sport talking. Winning is a possibility that is arranged for you by others, and it may not happen often, if at all. Thanks to our no-cut status, though, as a runner, performing is something you can always claim as your own, with performances unregulated by try-outs, playing time, or substitutions.

I like to think about runners after the season's over not just by what they accomplished but by what they will probably remember, probably because they are not necessarily going to tell you. Some of those thoughts, though, are revealed in our Senior Speeches at post-season banquets or when I run into an alumnus around town. Their recollections are routinely grounded in the substance of the sport, those hard practices, those muddied races, those long bus rides where teammates find ways to amuse themselves. Memories of abstracted elements of the sport - rankings, medal ceremonies, league records - seldom come into the conversations because they are always a cut below the mental vividness of what was real on the training trails or racecourses. The lesson is that the runners value most the substantive elements of our sport that they lived daily, what could be recalled later as genuine moments and not just someone else's interpretation of what is supposed to be important. So, in a weird way, what we manage by keeping the Sandy's of our sport involved is to preserve the possibility of more productive memories, the ones that are not only recalled fondly but which actually prove useful in life. 

IV
An Altered Perspective

It is the case that some eager scholastic coaches arrive at their craft with the belief that their most important job is to ferret out the talent in the enthusiastic masses and then primarily develop that talent and join it with other talent to create the teams we can celebrate for winning. This is certainly the understandable ideology of collegiate and professional sports  -  to create winning teams by selecting the best and dismissing the rest.

The simple question for scholastic sports and the educational institutions that create and sustain them is whether that ideology should rigidly apply to our level. Does the current scholastic sports paradigm provide the greatest athletic benefit to the greatest number and for the most years possible? Or does it, in fact, force the attrition of young adults who can't "make the cut," those 70% who leave by age thirteen, voluntarily or otherwise. Ironically, most scholastic sports are embedded in public institutions whose charters are always something to the effect of 'educational opportunities for all' but who then, curiously, provide sports programs that do exactly the opposite -- making cuts, yearly whittling the number of students 'allowed' to be athletes. Our sport, fortunately, has the ability to avoid that, to do scholastic sports another way, but with other sports it remains one of public education's greatest blind spots.

Much can be added to a young person's growth by a positive encounter with athletics.  However, our scholastic cross-country and track level is the only one at which coaches can promote significant access for athletes, even as they teach basic skills and enforce a sport's standards for effort and commitment. At the collegiate and professional levels which follow, commercial interests take over and talent for winning dictates access. For many, then, scholastic sports is the first and last chance to enjoy organized (and funded) competitive athleticism. For them, cross-country provides the unique benefit of never being denied access based on raw talent. That is important because other aspects of a scholastic-athlete's life can take on different and more productive attitudes with the successes and failures of a sporting engagement. We can never know for sure whether all those deeper lessons will stick, but in the remembering of a sport, in the recollections of teams and teammates by my alumni, I can be fairly certain that most of the sport, if I did my job with the right principles and practices, was productive. If we are committed to spreading the values of cross-country, it's imperative that we do our jobs for as many young athletes for as long as possible, and that we not only keep our open door open, but that we take seriously the creation of athletic opportunities for all the invested young adults who walk through that door. 

All the Sandy's out there who want to be runners - if only for a few years - will thank us for that.