Why can't Pat Henry get cross country athletes?

Cross country is not a major priority for Coach Henry. LSU was poor in it throughtout his time there. He might get a foreigner that can qualify for nationals but the emphasis will not be there to get the best Texas kids and qualify a team to nationals like Coach Hartman did. This is not a criticism of Dan Waters but just the reality of where our program is. Other schools like Texas will put more money in it than we will. How we do in cross country does not impact whether we win national track titles and that is what is important to Coach Henry.

How how does this fit in with Building Champions? If we don't want to win just drop the sport!

It does cost us two of the 19 points in the Lonestar Showdown every year!!!

Track and CC are a whole different animal when it comes to building champions...it's very hard for anybody to compete with Oregon there, and if we want to continue to win T&F national championships, we need to continue to focus our recruiting/$$$ on sprinters.

Despite how little of an emphasis we place on CC we usually split the LSS point because Texas is not that great at CC either...To Waters' credit, we've actually gotten pretty good return on our investment into CC.

It goes without saying that we've obviously gotten a great return on our investment into the sprinters/jumpers as well.

Well we lost both points last year and it cost us the trophy. We also lost both points this year. Who said anything about competing with Oregon. How about competing with ttu?

Our T&F programs are so far and above caring about t.u. Cross Country, it's not even funny. They're shooting for national titles, period. If we get one runner who can qualify for NCAA's in track in the mile every four years, our coaches are probably happy. It's really, really hard to recruit elite distance recruits. There's so few of them, and they all like going to the same places.

Hard to make a LSS argument, given that we get the bonus point from indoor/outdoor counting separately. As was pointed out, we more often than not split the points. Neither program is very good...our cross country team is incredibly young right now. I'd expect at least one to overtake Texas next year, and for it to stay that way for a while.

Man, I understand your beef with volleyball, but coming after the best program on campus? Ballsy.

I am not coming after anyone. The question was simple and honest. I asked why can't Pat Henry recruit cross country athletes.

We have won two national titles in outdoor t&f for two years but tu you was in the top 5 to 10 each year. They are not a terrible program. I hate having give away points in the lss every year. VB and CC seem to be give aways even though we won 1/2 point in VB this year.

We don't usually win women's swimming but we have and we are competitive. I don't think we have ever beaten tu in men's swimming but we are still competitive. We usually don't win either tennis point but we are competitive.

By the way, when are we giving Pat Henry a new outdoor facility equal to his stature as a coach and a national championship program. We have a great indoor facility but we haven't won an indoor championship yet!

To answer you question: He doesn't want to because track & field championships are almost always won with sprinters and jumpers. Even when Arkansas was dominant, they had plenty of jumpers and sprinters sprinkled in with their distance studs.

What LOB said. While what you're saying seems like a lot of "it seems like"s, in actuality, neither Texas men or women were in the top 40 at NCAA's in track last year.

I think you're completely miscategorizing the history of A&M CC. Unfortunately, Pat Henry just can't put a focus on the LSS in CC and hope to win Nation Titles in T&F. It just can't happen. There's not enough money and resources to go around. Period. At the end of the day, the level of athlete that we're getting right now is about what we're going to get, unless we convince some distance runner to come here for next to nothing. We can get sprinters to do that, because we have one of the top sprinting coaching staffs in the world. We can't get elite, NCAA-level distance runners to do that yet.


(PS, A&M women's swimming has won Big 12's 3 of the last 4 years...the fact that t.u. rests for every fall dual meet is more a flaw with the LSS methodology than the team's quality. A&M is the better program, and has been for about 5 years).

quote:

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unless we convince some distance runner to come here for next to nothing.

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What does that mean?

PS We haven't won the lss point for women's swimming and diving in the last three years including this year.

You say that Henry can't worry about the lss well that is why he was hired. I don't think BB agrees with your assessment.

So the only answers are that long distance runners won't come here for next to nothing or unlike Oregon (obviously a superior school) who can focus on indoor, outdoor and cc at the same time, we can't.

Really?

[This message has been edited by TopHat (edited 11/29/2010 10:51p).]

Yes, Texas has won the LSS in women's swimming. That's because they rest for early season dual meets, whereas our team saves their taper for Big 12's and National Champs, which is why we continually outperform Texas there, which is the way you're SUPPOSED to do it in swimming. That's why Texas' best swimmer left the program this fall, because they always swim SO well in the fall, and then bomb out in the Spring.

Pat Henry was not brought here to beat Texas in cross country. Pat Henry was brought here to win T&F National Championships. He's one of the 3 or 4 most successful track coaches in NCAA HISTORY! Heck, he's probably in the top 20 or 30 NCAA coaches in any sport at any school ever. In 5 years, he turned us into the most dominant track program, men's and women's, in the country.

[This message has been edited by AGBlastoff (edited 11/30/2010 10:20a).]

AGblastoff,

Why are you attacking me? I am attacking no one! Not you, not any coach, nor any player. I am an Aggie grad and have been following Aggie sports for almost 50 years. For my first 15 years of life we beat Darrell Royal's professional football team once and that was in 1967.

As an Aggie I like to win and I especially like to beat those on the 40 acres in everything which includes the lss. Wondering why we don't beat tu in cc and wondering why we don't have better cc recruits is no reason for your to belittle my opinion. BB is the one that set up the lss with Deloss Dodds and he did it to promote our athletic programs and as a way to measure our success against one of the top programs in the country.

We were sixth nationally in the Director's Cup Trophy (or whatever they call it now) and still lost the lss.

Gig em my friend and don't get so fired up because I would like to see us dominate tu in everything all the time.

As an Aggie I am very greatful for what BB has done with our athletic program. In my opinion, we are basically a top 20 program. Most Ags want to see us as a top 10 program every year to say the least and to have us mentioned as being one of the best in every sport.



[This message has been edited by TopHat (edited 11/30/2010 8:57a).]

Sorry, I shouldnt've been so harsh...but we often get people who come on this board and just whine about sports that they don't really follow nor understand, but only see a result. Your first couple of posts seemed to indicate that you fell into this category.

I can tell that you love the Ags and want them to do well. I'll redact all of the mean things I said. Friends?

What it comes down to is that CC and T&F are sort of an odd combination, because they are overlapping sports, and Pat Henry wins NC's in track by excelling in the sprint events. To continue winning those NC's the way he knows how, he can't invest any more (scholarships, recruiting resources) into the CC program that he does. At the same time, the way it's currently run, cross country is one of the least costly programs to house. If you have a track team, it costs next to nothing (relatively speaking) to keep a cross country team, and you hope that once every athletes (aka every 4 classes) you get one runner that shows quality at the NCAA level. At the very least, it adds a small bit of depth for NCAA Championships.

Texas has a ton of money. As our football team improves and we are able to pump a little more into a program like CC, that is effectively a tagalong for track ATM, it will likely nudge us ahead of Texas. It's kind of one of those things where neither school puts much focus on it (because of the interrelated nature of the two programs), so there's no real rhyme or reason to who wins that point. It comes down to who runs better that day, and will probably be an up and down effect (looking at rosters, we'll probably at least split for the next two years).

Sports like Track and swimming are a little bit tricky. Whereas in football and basketball, every game counts, in swimming and track, there's MAYBE 2, but usually only one that you target every season. It just doesn't work into the nature of these sports like it does other sports.

As you said, the LSS is designed to increase exposure to the smaller-revenue sports. Unfortunately, as originally designed, I'm not sure that the AD's had a good grasp of the nature of some of the sports that they were including.

TopHat -- Look at it this way: worst case scenario we beat Texas 4-2 in track/cc LSS points every year; should we scrape a CC point every once in a while, that's a 5-1 advantage. If track wins 5 points, we only need ~5 from the rest of the sports combined to win the thing. With the resources that are already pumped into our athletic program, that should be a piece of cake.

Thanks guys! No hard feelings AGBlastoff! See you at the Cotton Bowl!

BTHO lswho!

[This message has been edited by TopHat (edited 11/30/2010 10:35p).]

OK State became dominant rather quickly, I heard a few of those guys are only on partial...

Not the good ones. Those guys have usually always sucked at T&F with the exception of a few random distance kids.

Oklahoma State is only distance runners. They may have people on partials, but they also have enough of them on way more than that.

http://www.okstate.com/sports/m-track/mtt/okst-m-track-mtt.html

TopHat, something that you might be confused about is that CC and T&F share the same scholarship pool. So to be more competitive in CC, we would have to spend less scholarship money on T&F- thus eliminating our National Championship aspirations.

What everyone else is saying is that it is not worth sacrificing a shot at 4 NC's a year just so we beat the longhorns in CC.

Bingo FTAC - for scholarship purposes T&F and CC are the same sport. The NCAA limits D1 schools to 12.69 (dont ask me why such an odd number)scholarships for men and 18 for women for all 3 - indoor and outdoor T&F and CC - combined.

These limits affect different programs in different ways - depending on a lot of factors. Oregon doesn't get a lot of top-quality sprinters but Vin Lanana has a different coaching style than Pat Henry - and part of that has to do with geography. How many sprinters, hurdlers, or jumpers want to train in cold weather?

I do not know the scholarship distribution on Pat Henry's men's and women's T&F teams, but it wouldn't surprise me to find out that even 19 time All-American Porscha Lucas was only on partial scholarship.

The LSS is a nice competition to keep a long-standing rivalry going, but I'll take the National Championships (team and individual) over the LSS any time.

[This message has been edited by JR69 (edited 12/6/2010 12:25p).]