Thoughts on Nike Cross Nationals 2014

Eric Hamer, Katie Rainsberger, and Paul Roberts carry Colorado's hopes to Portland this weekend. Photos by Alan Versaw.

In six days, we'll have a new national high school cross country champion--well, four of them to be precise. Two teams and two individuals will be crowned in Portland on Saturday. Dispute will rage, of course, over whether the individual title winners at NXN or the winners at FLN are the rightful national champions, but both pairs will have some basis for the claim. And that's far from the worst thing that could ever happen to high school cross country.

For its part, NXN figures to be a little different this year.

The biggest difference, of course, is the course. Gone is Portland Meadows. Count me among those bidding a not-very-fond farewell.

I regard myself as blessed to have had two teams that ran there, but it was never my favorite course, not even close. The course, to be candidly honest, was a gimmick course. And Nike had a mud fetish. That mud fetish got a little out of control in 2012 post-race interviews with the contestants, and I suspect the pushback from that excessive bit of glee over all the mud became the beginning of the end for the Portland Meadows course.

Don't get me wrong. Mud is part of cross country. But mud is not the defining characteristic of cross country. If the course is muddy on race day, fine, go race. But engineering the mud--making all but certain it was there--was part of what made Portland Meadows a gimmick course. The whoop-de-dos were the other main gimmick of the course.

For an invitational, such contrived elements work perfectly fine. For a championship race, however, the overwhelming majority of people want a more straight-forward course. And it would appear that Nike, to their credit, has moved over to that kind of thinking. It's still Portland, so there still will be mud from time to time, but it should no longer be the defining characteristic of the course. And I join a long list of people in applauding the change.

As much as reasonably possible, a cross country championship should be designed to be decided by the contestants, not the contrivances of the course. The contrivances should not even have the appearance of playing a decisive role in the outcome of the race.

As one specific bonus of reducing the role of the engineered elements, this year's contestants can probably safely plan on a conventional length of spikes in their shoes without having to resort to rapiers on the feet that many have never run in before. That will serve the twin purposes of leveling the playing field and making the race a safer event for all.

The biggest obstacle to overcome with the new Glendoveer Golf Course venue is the logistic of moving a few thousand people from a nearby park-and-ride facility to the golf course. But, as this may well become a large part of the future of major cross country meets, it's something that cross country fans should begin making their peace with. There's no time like the present to start. Honestly, it's something football fans have long-since grown accustomed to, and it works very nicely in that setting.

Will the course be a true cross country course? Absolutely. There are still ups and downs, and plenty of them from what I hear, they just aren't man-made ups and downs contrived exclusively for the occasion and condensed into 50-meter stretches. And golf courses have precious little interest in maintaining semi-permanent mudholes on their properties. And, of course, there is no hard surface. Each of these is a strong positive counting in favor of the new course.

Hay bales? The NXN course description includes no mention of hay bales, nor does the course map mark the locations of any. As hay bales carry some weight of tradition in cross country, I have no strong feelings about their presence or absence. But, if Nike was paying attention to the feedback from the Portland Meadows course, they probably heard enough negative input about the hay bales to warrant leaving them off of this year's course. Once again, in the final analysis, gimmicks do more to detract from than add to the championship race experience.

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I know Nike represents the avant garde of uniform design. And, when I look for new uniforms for my own team, I keep coming back to Nike. Their designs are consistently my favorites.

That said, Nike took a few steps out toward the edge, and very nearly went toppling over the edge, with last year's NXN uniform designs. Here's hoping 2014 is a better year for team uniform design at NXN than 2013 was. Even more than I have grown weary of neon everything, I loathe the camo motif. Camo doesn't even look sharp on soldiers, but at least it serves a useful purpose in their case. And, nobody's team name looks good when it has the appearance of being stenciled onto a piece of black tape pasted across the chest.

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NXN is the pinnacle of the sport at the high school level. Whatever case you might otherwise want to make for FLN, it has only a very contrived team element, and cross country is--at bottom--a team sport. The very fact that the Foot Locker folks line the individuals up in teams bears testimony to the fact that even Foot Locker knows it's ultimately a team sport. And, in that sense, NXN stands alone as the national championship of high school cross country. I have an enduring gratitude to the Nike corporation for conceiving of this event and then making it happen.

In my heart of hearts, I hope to last long enough as a coach to see something come along for smaller schools as well. I don't in my wildest dreams imagine that Nike will double the number of teams they send to Portland to hold a second set of national championships for smaller schools, but I do hope that Nike, or someone, will see the opportunity in holding regional, or someday even national, championships for schools that simply don't have the numbers to compete with schools of 3000 - 8000 students except in the most magical of years. 

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For Colorado, this will be a lean year at NXN. Utah's riches are, at least in part, the occasion of Colorado's poverty. In the long term, it's up to us to find strategies that succeed against the Utah programs. 

For this year, however, Colorado sends three very promising individuals to NXN--Katie Rainsberger, Eric Hamer, and Paul Roberts. It's entirely conceivable that their high-altitude training pays some dividends on a grassy, rolling course. Among the girls, Rainsberger is a legitimate threat to win the thing. Hamer and Roberts both should have sights set on top-20 finishes. But, the beauty of it all is that nothing is guaranteed for any of the three. What would be the fun of running a race where the outcome is guaranteed? Nobody would ever go through all the lung-busting effort for a guaranteed outcome.

I'm certain I join with all the rest of Colorado in wishing each of these three very fine young athletes all the best in Portland.