Track and cross country are great sports, so why do we leave people with the impression that maybe we aren't really convinced of that?
One of the things I do on a fairly regular basis, especially in the off-season, is peruse the athletic websites of the various institutions of higher learning across our state. And, one of the things I’ve learned from my habit of perusing is that we do very poorly at promoting our own sports.
As fans, participants, parents, and coaches, we appear to accept our lot that cross country and track and field are second-tier sports in the great scheme of things. That most people simply aren’t interested in track and field/cross country, nor would they have any reason to be.
Enough of that!
I get it that football and basketball are revenue sports in a way that cross country and track and field are not. So, I more or less expect to see the advertisements for season ticket sales for these two sports dominating the athletic websites of these schools as they do.
But, if you dig a little deeper, it goes well beyond season ticket sales promotional campaigns.
In the state of Colorado, the University of Colorado, Colorado State University, the University of Northern Colorado, the Air Force Academy, Adams State University, the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, Colorado State University-Pueblo, Colorado Christian University, Western State Colorado University, Fort Lewis College, Regis University, Colorado School of Mines, Metro State, Colorado Mesa University, Colorado College, and Johnson & Wales University maintain intercollegiate athletic programs that include cross county and/or track and field.
For most of these institutions, the track and field/cross country portion of their athletic websites is very nearly an afterthought. And that is true even where the schools in question do not have a football program.
I guess I’m a little at a loss to explain why a school would maintain an athletic program like cross country but can’t think of anything to write about the program from December through most of August beyond an occasional press release about something like Academic All-American status conferred on an athlete. Admittedly, indoor and outdoor track and field more or less fill a void where cross country is concerned during winter and spring, but the point remains—is it that hard to write something every other week or so about an out-of-season program?
And we expect people to be interested and invested in what we don’t write about how?
I promise you, football does not have this issue.
I do not know where the responsibility for this lies at each school, nor do I care all that much about the specifics of responsibility. The bottom line is simply that cross country and track and field will never rise above second-tier status as long as we ourselves treat them as second-tier sports. And, it isn’t terribly expensive to post an article every other week or so.
But, what we see on the athletic websites of our in-state universities is more of a symptom than the disease itself. The same disease runs rampant in our high schools as well. It just has different symptoms at the high school level.
Although I am now out of the classroom, I recall frequent instances where members of the football or basketball teams who were in my classes were cajoling other students to come to their games. On occasion, when the object of the cajoling was one of my cross country team members and I was feeling the urge to spar a little, I would ask, “So, how long has it been since you’ve come to one of his/her cross country meets?”
That question was almost invariably followed by an extended pause of silence.
As in, “Oh, you’re suggesting this might be a two-way street? You’re suggesting that the affirmation by friends through attendance might extend beyond the realm of football?”
Well, yes, I am. Very perceptive of you to notice.
I only wish one of my team members had responded that way before I did. I desperately want them to know they have the same right to feel the honor of a classmate attending their sporting event as a football player does. But the reality is that we accept our second-tier status oh-so-subserviently. When football expects us to genuflect, we genuflect. Sometimes even when football doesn’t expect us to genuflect, we genuflect. It must be a habit we’ve developed…
Why is it we are so apologetic about our track and cross county—even down to the slogan we see on so many team shirts, “Our sport is your sport’s punishment.” We have nothing better to say of our sport than that? Really? That slogan was crafted to enhance the status of our sport? For whom?
I have neither expectation nor desire for cross country and track and field to exhibit the kind of shameless self-promotion that football and basketball are sometimes susceptible to. Truthfully, anywhere an entitlement mentality shows up, it leaves a lot of bad taste all around.
But, neither do we have to apologize for our sport. Neither do we have to walk the halls, whether at school or our workplace, thinking nobody who isn’t part of our sport could possibly be interested.
We can invite, sometimes even urge, our friends to come to our meets. We can extol the virtues of a sport where you have to, and get to (!), move around a little to see what’s happening. We can be exuberant about the fact that the clock never stops mid-event. We can celebrate our status as the sports where you can watch closer to the actual competitors than any other sports. We can feel good way deep down inside that our sports so rarely suffer from the sportsmanship issues that so frequently plague other sports. We can dance on the tables because ours are sports where the genders enjoy an equality of opportunity and exposure matched almost nowhere else in life.
We can work to create the kind of atmosphere at our meets that mimics much of what football and basketball do so successfully. If you need help with the vision what that looks like, take an opportunity to attend a meet run by Mark Roberts (head track and cross country coach, Lyons High School) someday.* I’m reasonably confident in saying that an enthusiastic, well-informed announcer who pronounces most of the names correctly is 90% of the battle in creating atmosphere. We can certainly do that much—at least for track. In cross country, of course, atmosphere works a little differently, though it is still important. A good announcer in cross country is still a huge plus, just not as big a part of the picture as in track.
And where is it written in stone that all announcers have to be male?
Instead of waiting for the cheerleaders in your school to put up a few posters about your next track or cross country meet, check with the administration, secure permission, make your own, and put them up around the hallways yourselves. Besides, that’s a whole lot more fun than grousing about how cheerleaders don’t even know that track and cross country exist.
If your local newspaper won’t cover track and cross country, start your own team website or Facebook page. And then be faithful with it! If your local newspaper won’t send a reporter to an away meet, ask if they’ll accept an article from a student reporter. If they need help with photos, point them to me. I have repeatedly given photos to local newspapers for editorial use free of charge and am delighted to do that. I may or may not have someone covering the exact meet in question, but can usually supply a file photo of a particular athlete.
Let’s make a diligent and sustained effort to look at and treat our sports as top-tier sports. Only then do we have any reason to expect that others will begin to treat them the same way.
* - Mark, you should seriously consider doing a clinic session someday on hosting a meet. I know of nobody better in the state of Colorado to do that.