AAU junior olympics large fight

You can see it on the MileSplit broadcast, middle of the 100m heats, kids start running, and people are looking towards the top of the stands.

Local news says people reacted to what they thought was an active shooter, but no shots were fired.

Apparently during the fight somebody flashed a gun. Ive heard different stories from the few people I know were there. One person said shots were fired. Another person said the starting gun went off at the same time the fight started and people were confused. Either way it was chaos. Lots of scared kids

myfox8.com

3 taken to hospital after fight during Junior Olympics event in North Carolina A&T State University stadium

Emily Mikkelsen

GREENSBORO, N.C. (WGHP) — A fight led to a heavy police presence at North Carolina A&T State University during a sporting event. Guilford County Emergency Services worked with about 11 patients…

Link:myfox8.com/news/north-carolina/greensb...

Sounds like large fight among adults. Only one exit from the meet so people were getting trampled. Meet canceled for the day. AAU meet is always way too big and runs behind so it’s going to be a cluster for the remainder of the meet. Not regretting my decision to take my kids to USATF JOs last week…

Someone screen captured the flotrack moment. Can’t see much other than kids running away.

For those who really want to see more, if you have flotrack, someone on Facebook posted the following. It’s pretty accurate (javelin stream has most activity).

For those with Flotrack go to 8/2
At around the 5:12 mark for
Shotput
Discus
Javelin.
Everyone running from the stands went all through the field event area.
Awards stand 1:50 mark

What is a better meet for the kids... USATF JOs or this AAU JO meet (aside from this incident)? Is competition the same? Is one smoother than the other?

AAU is much much larger with easier means of qualifying. That can be a pro or a con for different people. Both move fairly smoothly although with AAUs larger numbers there is less margin for error and sometimes things can run way behind (although things can run behind at USATF too). Also, age groups are single year from 9-14 at AAU but two year groupings at USATF for all ages (9-10, 11-12, etc). That means better competition for the odd-number ages kids at USATF but at AAU better chances for medals and what they call “national” records (misleading, really just meet records).

Competition-wise, it’s a mixed bag for the sprints. They seem fairly even. For distance races, USATF traditionally is faster. There are always exceptions though (Athing Mu went the AAU route, for example).

There are also regional preferences, with more west coast clubs preferring USATF and east coast clubs preferring AAU it seems.

For me it’s an easy call, I have distance kids who want more competition and I want to deal with less of a sea of humanity, so we’ve gone the USATF route.

Hey thanks for the great info. My son has expressed interest in national meets. We have done local and regional meets and have weighed the pros and cons of traveling to a national meet. Next year USATF JO is in Eugene which may be worth the travel.

Aau is much easier to advance typically. Seems like more of a revenue generation thing. Once I recall my kids had to be to top 5(!) at our usatf regional to get to national. Really good runners stayed home.

I much preferred usatf for years until they pulled that nonsense going after their own youth chair people. Lost all respect at that point.

Also, for some clubs it will just depend where the national is. In my state this year, many did Aau because NC is way closer than CA. Other years, aau is further away so people go the other way.

This is crazy. I enjoy track meets because typically they are a heck of a lot less stressful than soccer games or other sporting events. Track and cross country are all ultimately about self-improvement and there typically is not much to cause controversy (other than maybe someone getting cutoff or impeded). I can't imagine why people would be fighting about a sprint event run in lanes. This had to have concerned something other than track and field.

the 'Report Post' army on a hair trigger with this thread

A parent or a coach probably rooted a bit too hard for their kid or started trash talking a rival. Someone told them to cool it or to shut up and it escalated from there. Sadly, I have seen it before because some people need to crow loudly about how great their 8 year old future NFL superstar just whooped everyone good and the other kids should just quit and go home.