The biggest Problem in Track and Field Recruiting, and how you can solve it!
Winning an NCAA championship in division 1 is the greatest achievement for any track and field team. It is also safe to say that the SEC is the best conference right now in the entire sport. One of their current teams has won the men’s outdoor title more than 75 percent of the time since the year 2009. And the Florida Gators alone have done it six times since 2012! The women’s side isn’t much better. From 2009 to 2011 Texas A&M and Oregon finished first and second every single year. Although the names have changed the story hasn’t because for the past 2 seasons it has always been Florida and Texas in the top 2 spots. All of the teams I just mentioned gave us Grant Holloway, Joseph Fahnbulleh, Athing Mu, and now Parker Valby. Simply put the best teams have all the best talent, and that is why they win so much But track and field isn’t like other sports. Track and field recruiting is pretty broken in the NCAA, and that’s the only real reason why it seems like nobody ever wins anything who isn’t wearing one of the same few uniforms.
I really love track and field particularly at the college level. I competed in it, and coached in it, before moving on to what I do right now. If you want to run track in college, I don’t tell you this for you to give up on your dream. I actually care about you, and I want to help you. So to do that I don’t know how to be anything less than honest with you. So here is the truth without photoshop about track and field recruiting. A bunch of things they don’t want you to know, and were never going to tell you anyway. But there is a solution to get you more D1 college offers, because you can still manipulate the game to your advantage.
All the top recruits go to the same colleges
In 2024 Texas Tech has 5 men’s sprinters ranked inside the top 16 of the nation. That means that 5 of the 16 men who would qualify for the NCAA indoor meet would be theirs. Their women are doing the exact same thing with 3 ranked inside the nation’s top 6. But what I neglected to mention is that five of the eight athletes I just described came there as transfers from some other college, either in JUCO or D1.
In the men’s mile, Northern Arizona, Washington, BYU, and UNC all have multiple men inside the top 20 for the mile. Together they account for eleven men on that list, with 4 of them from Washington alone. All of the best runners are on the same teams! Regardless of whether or not they have the best coaching we’ll never get to find out because these athletes were already better than everyone else before they got there.
The top schools in D1 are the ones every wants to go to. USC and all the other big names know this. That works to their advantage in recruiting, just like it does in every other sport. For that reason 8 of the top 100 girls recruits in all of the events for the class of 2024 are committed to the Trojans. They have 2 more out outside the top 100 to go along with 4 of the top 20! But consider what is wrong with that picture. Men’s track teams only have 12.6 scholarships for the entire team. Women get 18 in total. Regardless of how you feel about it, it is simple math that all the talented athletes on their commitment list can’t be getting full rides. If they were, then more than half the scholarships would be gone to just the freshman class alone.
The real reason track and field recruiting is so hard is because literally, all the top recruits crowd their way into the same conferences, specifically hoping to go to the top schools in those conferences. On the men’s side, the Tennessee Volunteers have 13 men committed in the class of 2024 ranked inside the SCA boys 300. That’s essentially a full scholarship team of athletes for 1 class. The real reason the overcrowding happens is because unlike every other college sport you watch on television, it is pretty hard for college coaches to identify all the recruits who belong in D1.
Why can’t college track and field coaches find you in recruiting
There is nothing like AAU or whatever basketball is doing now with EYBL and Adidas Gauntlet for track. There are no legitimate camps like they have for football for track athletes to get scouted. USA volleyball even makes it easy for coaches in that sport to find talent. Simply put most college coaches know where to go to find D1 level talent. If they don’t recruit you, it doesn’t mean you’re not good. It just means that they got somebody else from the camps, and tournaments they attended whom they believe is at least as good as you are.
The only place college coaches can see a bunch of talented track recruits in one place is at national level competitions. Which basically excludes anyone who isn’t at least 4 star level in the current system. That means college coaches can find some 4 stars and all the 5 star recruits very easily, but they have almost no way to find everyone else who are 3 star level and down. Don’t get me wrong, if you reach out to them and you’re a good fit they will recruit you. But if you are sitting around in a state like Montana waiting for a D1 school to call, it’s likely not going to happen. That is even if you are a 3 star recruit. Combine this with the fact that all the kids want to go to the same schools, and the best programs end up with overcrowded rosters of athletes, knowing most of them aren’t going to compete for much of anything. They become just a bunch of bodies. The athletes they expect to win are the ones with real scholarship dollars.
The college track and field talent gap
This is the real reason why the 25th ranked 60 meter dash runner in the SEC conference right now for the men ran 6.77 seconds. That time would make him the conference leader in the NEC conference which stands for Northeast conference, and is actually a thing in D1. He’s not going to win anything, probably ever in the SEC. But he could be a conference champion somewhere else.
We are experiencing a problem that I call talent jamming. Where all the top talent gets jammed into a few conferences in D1. Which creates a whole bunch of upset athletes hitting the transfer portal to swap places at some other school that’s just like the one they came from. Meanwhile everywhere else in D1 you can win the conference with performances that wouldn’t even get you invited to a conference meet where all the talent is jammed up. This is in the best interest of the top schools. They get to hoard all the talent, even if they don’t use it all. And by doing so they can keep all the lesser known programs from ever having a chance to compete against them.
What this really looks like for the world we are living in right now, is that 5 star recruits get found by the top schools, and they all go to the same few places that dominate any particular event. But 4 star recruits, especially the lower ones, crowd into those same conferences, even without a scholarship. 3 star recruits and 2 star recruits as a result get lost in the shuffle. They have no idea where to go because schools in the Big Ten and SEC tell them they have no interest in them. To be honest, a lot of them get taken advantage of and might end up outside D1 entirely in D2, NAIA, or even D3. No offense to anyone who goes there, but if you want to go D1 and you are a 2, or especially a 3 star level recruit then you can do it. The only reason you didn’t is because a coach somewhere ended up taking somebody else who probably wasn’t even as good as you anyway.
To clarify 3 star recruits normally are at the state championship final, but often times didn’t win everything. And 2 stars normally can win a league, county, or even regional level championship. They just aren’t a serious threat to make the state final at least in most places around the country.
This problem only exists because recruits really don’t know any better. So they take what they think is the best offer available. Smaller don’t have the resources to randomly call every good athlete, especially if they are not in their state.
How to get recruited for college track and field
If you are legit as a 2 or 3 star recruit, then many of those other schools not named USC would love for you to reach out to them an e-mail for them to consider recruiting you. You do realize that’s what the recruiting questionnaires are actually for on their websites! Take it from me, I used to coach in D2 and the reason my team got pretty good pretty quickly is because I found a bunch of 2 to 3 star recruits who could have fit in just fine somewhere else in D1, and convinced them to join my team. They just didn’t know where that place was in D1 so they took what they believed to be the best offer available. That ignorance is what built my program overnight, and also gives me a job now to make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else.
Your dream might be to compete for a big time school in the SEC, and if it is and you have the talent to do it, then you should pursue it. But if you are not getting a lot of scholarship money to go, there was probably someone else in D1 who would have loved to give you that money, and wouldn’t jam you and your talent up either when you get there. But for now the same schools will keep winning everything. As long as you don’t choose to go somewhere else, the fact that the school you attend isn’t using you that much, is the reason why somebody else who actually would, never gets a chance to win much at all in the first place.
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