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Stanford coach Peter Tegen.
"I'd like to look at moving NCAAs off of a Monday." That sentence wouldn't be remarkable coming from any fan of a championship team who has had to take vacation days or skip classes to watch their runners on the biggest stage. It carries a bit more weight coming from the lips of Vin Lananna, current custodian of the University of Oregon running tradition and architect of the 2008 U.S. Olympic Track & Field Trials. Lananna's public job description may not literally include "raising the profile of distance running in the U.S.," but it might as well, and Lananna thinks changing a scheduling quirk that goes back more than 35 years is worth considering.
"We've tried to move to Saturday," added Arkansas' John McDonnell. "We've always been told that we'll be lost in the football noise, or that we can't get a golf course on Saturday. Well, we're not running on a golf course tomorrow."
Indeed, of the past four NCAA cross country sites, only two have been golf courses, and Indiana State has signaled their willingness to keep holding the meet at the Wabash Valley Family Sports Center for as long as the NCAA wants.
"Imagine the crowd if we had the meet on a Saturday," said McDonnell. "You'd have a hard time keeping them off the course. That's what we need in this sport."
Another change discussed, albeit with less authority, in Sunday's press conferences was the idea of increasing the distance of the women's championship race. Currently, the men's race is 10k, the women's 6k.
Stanford's Peter Tegen, who coaches both teams, noted that parity might not be as great as it looks. "The men are trying to avoid having to run every single race at the longer distance. That should tell us something. If we talk seriously about changing the date, the race distance will play a role [because of reduced recovery time between Regionals and Nationals]."
Athletes' reaction to the idea was guarded. "It would only be fair if we had to run 8k," said Stanford's Arianna Lambie. "Women middle-distance runners have a better chance [to do well in cross country] than men do. If cross country wants to be more of a distance event, that would be the way to go."
For NC State's Julia Lucas, that's just the point. "I would love to move up to 10k," she said. "I feel like that would benefit me. But as for the whole women's competition, our talent pool is much less condensed [across distances] than the men's is. I think it would make a less entertaining race for the spectators, so I think we should stay at this distance for at least a few more years."
Posted by Parker Morse at 6:55 p.m. | Tags: 2006 NCAA Cross Country
GTF commented, on November 23, 2006 at 9:47 p.m.:
Change can be good, but change for the sake of change does not seem all that wise. Moving it from Monday to the weekend, even in this time of dedicated cc courses, would limit potential hosts. The race distances need no changing, at least not in the direction of longer. Lucas has it right, 6K (or even 5K) would continue to work just fine.