IN PRAISE OF THE CRAPPY TEAM (May 29, 2002)
My alma mater, Stanford, won the PAC-10 Men's Track Championship a couple of weekends ago. Fortunately, when I was on the team 30-some years ago it was crappy, so I didn't have to deal with that kind of thing. We weren't uniformly crappy, since we had a handful of national caliber athletes, even a future Olympian here and there. But in terms of our ability to score enough points to win a meet--any meet--it just wasn't happening.
Even when we competed against Oregon State, the second-crappiest team in the conference, we couldn't seem to pull it off. And when we had to battle USC, the conference powerhouse, it took all the courage we could muster to get on the plane. And that was in the days when airline food was palatable.
A few days before the USC meet one year, our head coach brought the team together in front of a chalkboard to fire up collective confidence. He went through the events one by one, chalk stick a-blazin', showing that if everyone ran, jumped and threw to the best of his ability--or maybe several notches above his ability--the team could garner enough points to edge the Trojans. As everyone sat there pondering the lofty performances needed to pull off an upset, someone actually checked the numbers.
"Coach," the guy piped up. "You added wrong. We still lose by 10 points."
That sort of took the edge off the pep talk. And the actual meet didn't go so well either.
The nice thing about being on a crappy team, though, is that you can pretty much focus on your own performance. There's no great pressure to do more events than you should. If doubling and tripling your top distance runners still leaves the team dozens of points shy of victory, you tend to let your distance runners rest. And that's exactly what most college runners need.
Collegiate track and field is routinely chastised for being more concerned with team scores than athlete development, and I think the criticism is warranted. Too many college runners finish their careers injured from racing when they should have rested, or mentally buried under a landslide of competition.
Of course not every program sacrifices athletes for victories, and some coaches, like Stanford's current track impresario Vin Lananna, have shown a commendable interest in long-term development. It's a source of some pride, to be sure, if one of your runners ends up on the Olympic team some day. But real rewards for most college coaches, such as they are, come from collecting enough points to get the program noticed.
And that's why most do what they do, including, sometimes, running their charges to death. If you want smiles from the three A's--alumni, administration, athletic director--send your runners out to earn enough points to score some victories, or at least enough points in the conference meet to get on the radar screen.
Of course that was someone else's experience. As a member of a crappy track team, I experienced few demands on my skinny legs, except those inspired by my own ambition and the coach's genuine interest in my development.
Except once. In my senior year we competed against U.C. Berkeley in the final dual meet of the season. They were our bitterest rival, so, without much prodding from our coaches, we eagerly doubled up where we could, hoping for the point or two that would make a difference. And it worked. We won 76 to 69.
Man, that was sweet fun, one of the highlights of my collegiate career. And it made me wonder: what would a conference victory have felt like?
Not that that would have been a good thing, of course.
-Don
