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Five ways to save the fading sport of track and field

Howie Stalwick
For The Olympian
Dear Track and Field:


Your sport is stupid.

Sincerely,

The World

Oh, if only it was that simple.

Wait a minute. It IS that simple.

Track and field, run the way it is today, is to rocket science what Britney Spears is to parenting.

A beautiful sport, so grand and visible and important at one time, has been relegated to the agate section of newspapers everywhere.

And television coverage? The financial godsend of the sports world? You have a better chance of finding an NHL game on television than a track meet, even though PBS documentaries on whale mating draw higher ratings than the NHL.

Hockey and track have been remarkably similar in their attempts to market themselves. That is, the brain trusts of both sports are, in fact, brain dead.

Thank goodness that yours truly, fresh from covering the NCAA track championships in Sacramento last week for The Olympian and other publications, has arrived on the scene just in time to save track and field from itself. And don't worry, hockey fans -- I'll save your sport later.

Following are the five easy steps necessary to make track and field at least slightly more relevant than soccer, C-SPAN and Phil Donahue:

1) Never, ever, EVER again announce, print or in any manner whatsoever refer to distances in meters. We are Americans; we are too stubborn, arrogant and ignorant to learn the metric system. Deal with it. No one knows, cares about or wants to figure out what 69.35 meters means.

2) Catch up with the 20th century -- we'll worry about the 21st century in due time -- and print names and numbers on the backs of jerseys. Spectators need the Hubble telescope would to read the names and/or numbers on jersey bibs. And why should anyone but a toddler wear a bib, anyway?

3) Trim way, way, WAY back on the number of events and athletes. The college 10,000-meter run is a gazillion-laps snore-fest. Get rid of it. Eliminate or greatly reduce the number of prelims. No one wants to watch five heats of the 1,600 relay. And what's with that 800 relay for high school girls? Gas it -- no one would notice.

4) Hold every event in the main stadium. At far too many meets, the throwers are transformed into off-Broadway performers, banished to the track and field hinterlands. At Sacramento, spectators needed GPS systems to navigate their way around corn dog stands, storage sheds and Official NCAA Athlete Urine Testing Stations to watch Shelton's Nick Owens and Olympia's Adam Midles finish in the top five in a thrilling hammer competition. Unfortunately, they were seen by a fraction of the fans who watched every other event staged inside Hornet Stadium.

5) Give the media a break. Face it -- you're dealing with low-life sports writers, not the brightest of mammals. When someone breaks a record, records one of the world's best times or does something else significant, highlight those feats when distributing results. A brief, oft-garbled announcement over the public address system -- which could barely be heard inside the sauna that Sacramento State cleverly disguised as a press box -- is not good enough.

Like it or not, track and field, the media is your primary connection to the masses. Your steadfast refusal to reach out to the media, or the masses, or damn near anyone outside your ever-shrinking inner circle, is killing a sport that can be so wondrous.

Now, about that plan to save hockey.

Howie Stalwick is a freelance sports writer in Post Falls, Idaho. He covers Washington State football, WSU and Gonzaga men's basketball and various other sports for The Olympian and dozens of other newspapers and magazines across North America.

Um...so anyone have any decent ideas on how to save our sport?

I agree with the idea of holding all of the events within the main stadium (or very near to it), but isn't safety a consideration that has to be dealt with? Are today's stadiums and tracks large enough to contain all of the events and run them, several at the same time, without officials and athletes worried about putting their health at risk?

We are a stubborn race, but I doubt that anyone would want to hear the 100m announced as the 328.083 foot sprint. I think that most people can handle a simple conversion, or, with enough exposure, come to think of the distances, heights, etc. in relative measures. I couldn't tell you off of the top of my head the exact empirical equivalent to a height, but I do have an appreciation for how high it is relative to other heights. Repetition is key. What is also key is not running it in metric and announcing it in empirical or vice versa. You never know where it's really at if you have estimates coming from the announcer. I recently dealt with that at a meet and it left the spectators completely and utterly confused. Then again, I was sitting next to a pair of transplanted Germans who strongly feel that the US needs to suck it up and convert, but I digress...

Jerseys? We do need more exposure. Well, whatever. Yes, I do think that it would be better if names and numbers could be more visible, but considering the size of the stadium and the size of a distance runner's chest, there's not much that you can do about it. If someone wants to improve this particular aspect of the sport, I think that it's going to most easily be done by television. Mimic football. Put athlete head shots next to their name and lane number, and always make sure that an athletes name appears on the bottom of the screen when they are the one that the camera is focusing on. Announcers are garbled and often confused, so merely saying the name out loud once is likely to enlighten no one.

Trim way, way, WAY back on the number of events and athletes. The college 10,000-meter run is a gazillion-laps snore-fest. Get rid of it. Eliminate or greatly reduce the number of prelims. No one wants to watch five heats of the 1,600 relay. And what's with that 800 relay for high school girls? Gas it -- no one would notice.

That is ridiculous. If they're complaining about the distance races or particular relays, I think that we've already discussed a solution: don't show it during tv coverage! Instead, show something that's a lot more exciting and interesting, like pole vaulting (what a perfect example). However, just because something doesn't hold the attention of the ADD viewers at home, that certainly does not mean that it should be eliminated from the sport. So many events are occurring at once during a track meet that, if you're truly getting bored of the prelims or aren't enticed by a certain race, you have several other options playing themselves out right in front of you at the same time. You can't watch it all, even if you tried.

Media relations do need to be improved, and perhaps the enthusiasts need to make a bigger deal out of things that they consider significant. I don't think that it would be that bad of an idea to hand reporters the results with a facesheet on top listing particularly impressive performances, race highlights, and any record-breaking feats. Maybe we could even physically illuminate those accomplishments that we're jumping up and down about in neon yellow or pink or green or what have you so that a bit of our enthusiasm jumps off the page to them. They're obviously a bit too busy suffering (fyi I don't think that the Sac State press box is really so bad as he said) and a bit too indifferent before they even arrive to notice them on their own.

Effort must be exerted on BOTH sides, if only for the sake of the athletes who train so hard to do what they love yet are left uncelebrated in the outcome.

rainbowgirl28 wrote:http://www.theolympian.com/sports/blog/story/132156.html

Five ways to save the fading sport of track and field

Howie Stalwick
For The Olympian
Dear Track and Field:


Your sport is stupid.

Sincerely,

The World

Oh, if only it was that simple.

Wait a minute. It IS that simple.



Howie Stalwick is a freelance sports writer in Post Falls, Idaho. He covers Washington State football, WSU and Gonzaga men's basketball and various other sports for The Olympian and dozens of other newspapers and magazines across North America.

Ahh...that makes a lot more sense now. Well, if track and field is one of the other "various other sports" that doesn't deserve a name, I guess that I shouldn't have expected anything else.

bvpv07 wrote:We are a stubborn race, but I doubt that anyone would want to hear the 100m announced as the 328.083 foot sprint. I think that most people can handle a simple conversion, or, with enough exposure, come to think of the distances, heights, etc. in relative measures. I couldn't tell you off of the top of my head the exact empirical equivalent to a height, but I do have an appreciation for how high it is relative to other heights. Repetition is key.

I think he was more concerned with the field events on this one and how they are reported in the media and on the scoreboard. Especially in the throws, I have no idea what the imperial equivalent is. There is no harm in posting the non-metric results even if the metrics are used for qualifiers and records.

Get rid of the scholarship limits for track and field. That would allow the private schools to field competitive teams for dual meets again. When the scholarship limits hit in the 80's, USC could no longer field a deep squad because UCLA could attract talent with partial scholarships and USC couldn't because of the cost of going to school.

Most of you are too young to remember, but the Pac 8 dual meets were a team even and a BIG DEAL. Even the student bodies went nuts. They would fill up Drake Stadium at UCLA for dual meets with USC and Oregon. Oregon probably sold out the whole season. I remember some walk-on miler for either USC or UCLA won the race in the dual meet and was a hero for the next year. He probably didn't have to buy a drink for the rest of his career.

Partially because college track was big, so was high school track because of the visibility of college track. When I was in high school, all the stud football players came out because it was considered cool.