XC recruiting in junior year - my experiences

TheGFG
Mon, 16 Sep 2013 17:47:14 +0000

The only insight I have into this, as the parent of a college distance runner, is that high school cross country courses vary quite a bit in difficulty, and some are just plain inaccurately measured (think school courses as opposed to state championship courses). Therefore, college coaches will prefer a 1500, 1600, 3000, or 3200 track time for your athlete. Not that a track 5k time wouldn’t be very helpful too, but not many high schoolers have the chance to run that distance on the track.

From what we could tell, coaches have roster spots allotted for both xc and track. Obviously, there is an overlap with the distance runners since they do both. But since my D mostly ran the 800 and 1600, and was better at those than the 5K, it seemed that she was recruited under the track umbrella. Others were more longer distance kids, so were not.

That said, the coaches’ response could very well be code for: “You times are a little slower than what we typically look for. Get back to us in the spring and we’ll see if the improvement is enough.”