Worried Cross-Country Dad

College is NCAA championships and that's it. Nothing else matters.

I don't know what there is such a difference between high school and college. Maybe because it's always been that way? In my local area the league is cutting down on the dual meets. The coach has them in invitationals every Saturday? That's a lot. The dual meets are a great learning experience but poor performances don't matter much. It should be a time when high schoolers get to learn how to race with little to no pressure being put on them.

This is pretty much the answer for college. As for HS racing, for most they are just starting to race in High School. This is an opportunity for them to learn HOW to race. They need the experience to learn. It's also another opportunity to work hard and gain better fitness during something that should be fun. By the time you get to college you should have enough racing experience that you shouldn't need to race as frequently to get it right (you should still be learning though).

With all that said, they shouldn't be racing twice per week every week. That's just a bad league.

At the HS level many states have a league with a "regular season" that has mid-week races. Teams then add invitationals on the weekends and schedules become packed. Realistically, most of those teams don't really get to do more than a couple of workouts during the season since their schedule is so dense. They're so new to the sport though that they can race into shape and be just fine.

At the collegiate level we don't have any league meets to worry about. Everything is invitationals until we hit our conference meet (our most important race) then the regional and national meet which basically all happen in the last 4 weeks of the season.

Since our goal is pretty much just to be ready for conference and regionals, there's no pressure to have everyone geared up for a dozen regular season meets. Racing every other weekend (like most college teams) gives us a good balance of learning how to race and getting in the workouts we need.

At this level most kids are race savvy from their million HS races so my role is to keep getting them in shape August, September, and early October. Add in that racing more 8k's puts a big toll on athletes, we'd rather train well knowing we arrive at the end of October in great shape.

We could lose every meet before that and it would have no impact on if our season was successful or not.

My daughter, who is a 9th grader, is struggling with the same thing. In her conference, most of the teams run their JV teams during the weekday meets and reserve their varsity teams for the weekend invitationals. Her team runs at both (and is also the worst team in the conference). I've told her that it's fine to either skip the weekday meet or just treat the race as a tempo run. Her coaches don't provide her with any direction when it comes to racing anyway, so they don't seem to even know if she is racing or tempoing despite large fluctuations in her times.

High Schools pay their coaches by the hour

Not true at all. We get a small stipend. 3000-4000 for the season at pretty much every school around where I live. Might come out to minimum wage for the hours, so you have to do it for more than the money. Most coaches where I live shoot for a meet every week to every other week.

Every high school I've ever known offers a ~$3-5k stipend for coaches regardless of season length or time committed. There are teams where the coaches were rumored to tank sectional meets to end their seasons earlier because they didn't get paid extra for going longer. Obviously no coaches admitted it, but certain teams would do big workout two days before important meets and always underperform.

If your children’s coach is having them race twice a week they don’t know what they’re doing. HS kids should be racing once a week, at most.

Back in the day when I ran we would often run a dual, tri, or quad meet during the week and then an invitational on the weekend. By the time I was done with HS that line of thinking was beginning to change and I noticed that I improved. Most kids today race even less than that.

One thing that kids today do seem to be lacking, though, is racing in small groups. Their sole racing experience is in big invitationals. Invitationals are still great but dual meets seem to have definitely fallen out of favor. Smaller meets like dual through quads instill racing tactics and teams should run at least one or two throughout the season.

Yes, the coach has them doing tri-meets and quad meets in the middle of the week and invitationals on the weekends. On top of that, they often do a speed workout during the week, which seems like too much to me.

My daughter is to the point where she now just wants to treat cross-country as a chance to get in shape, and not worry about the competitive aspect of the sport. However, she's getting a lot of feedback from her coaches because she isn't "taking her commitment to the team seriously enough."

They simply have a bad coach. 2-3 Saturday invite races before championship are more than enough. Get a house in a different school district.

This team will be cooked in Oct and Nov.

Yup.. Not all HS teams programs race that often . We race once a week and will have our variety kids tempo a small Friday league meet if there are large invitational meets on the week before and after.... Varsity has usually 9-10 races.. about 7 before championship season... varsity kids will race about 4-5 of those 7 hard then the 3 championship races hard also...

This is a different problem. If you’re slow and racing twice a week, that’s too much, but that’s also the way to get them into shape. If you’re fast you can tempo it, but that’s not possible for everyone.

the best team I know now will likely have 5+ runners under 16 and will likely be the best in Maryland this November, and they’ll probably do well at NXR. They race their top guys somewhere between 5-7 times: 2 in September (getting accustomed to it), 2 in October (sharpening and preparing for big meets), and 3 in November (league champs, “special” champs, and NXR). If you race more, you’re not going to hit the key workouts you need to get fast, but if you can tempo every midweek instead of racing you’ll get fitter and fitter.

If a race is on Saturday and you tempo during the week, do you also have them do a long run sometime during the week?

My high school coach would treat one of the two meets (usually a dual meet) as a glorified hard tempo run. We were more or less expected to run in a pack. But we had a good team (5th man 9:16 two mile), so we could get away with it. I sympathize with the OP as I generally hated XC and having to kill myself only once a week made it bearable, oh, and the team stuff too. I think I was born with the no distance gene. Could not run 2x a day very often without great fatigue. I loved his policy.

Yep, this is too much racing. High school only needs to race once a week with the varsity taking the weekend off the week before league or conference. One or two mid week races are fine if they are a distance shorter than a 5k.

This is the norm. Midweek meets are racing ops for the aspiring runners and the participators. Sounds like your kids are on the bubble of aspiring and varsity?

My kids are private school, they don't do midweek meets.

The local publics seem to have their top runners tempo the race or even skip it. Those meets are pretty meaningless here.

If you're concerned about too much running, just run interference. Schedule a doctors appt, dentist appt, meeting with a teacher, something to get out of a practice here and there. Some coaches are def crazy.