Cross Country (XC) is a sport that is incredibly hard to understand. It barely shows up on television, much less media coverage at any level. In reality, the only people he really know anything about it, are the people who do it. And no I am not including any athlete who has used cross country as preparation for track and field or conditioning for another sport. But if you are someone who knows what it means to go for a Sunday “long run”, or what it means to run mile intervals then you are in fact a legitimate cross country athlete, regardless of what your 5K pr (personal record) is.

The irony is that cross country athletes might as well be considered the black sheep of the track and field community. At least when you ask the general public. People watch Olympic track and field… but they do not watch Olympic cross country. But believe it or not, cross country runners are actually the true stars of college track and field. And if you have the potential to develop into a quality Cross Country runner, it is your best bet at earning an all elusive track and field scholarship in college. And here is why.

Cross Country is a championship sport in the NCAA. So there are college programs that may not be able to legitimately compete for a national title in track and field, but they can in cross country. Cross country also requires to select their best 7 runners to compete for a team score at their championship meet. Winning a track meet at the conference level will normally take about 32 athletes on either men’s or women’s side. But XC, just like basketball only requires a coach to have a quality starting 5 at the minimum in order to make noise on the national stage. If a college coach can figure out how to get 5 high quality distance runners to the line healthy, they have always got a shot to win big.

Likewise, college Track and Field is not what you think it is. Unlike almost any other sport like Basketball or Football, it is not a team match up sport. Different teams have roster sizes that can vary from 20 athletes all the way up to more than 60. It is also an equivalency sport where there are at least 18 individual events contested at a normal conference championship meet in college. But track and field is also an equivalency sport, which means that colleges have fewer scholarships available to give to their team, than the number of total events. In other words every college coach must solve the problem of having enough athletes to compete for a championship with nowhere near enough money to go around. The most common solutions are simple. Coaches will recruit many athletes who will go without any scholarship dollars for track and field, even at the D1 level to allow the coach to fill out their roster. Or their other option will be to give almost none of their athletes a full scholarship in order to make sure that most recruits get a little bit of the scholarship pie.

This problem is compounded by the fact that the NCAA acknowledges Indoor Track and Field, Outdoor Track and Field, and Cross Country, as separate sports. But the scholarships given out for each come out of the same yearly budget. If you’ve got 12.6 men’s scholarships to give to your entire team across all 3 seasons, then giving 1 to a javelin thrower screws you over, because they don’t compete indoor, and they have absolutely nothing to do with cross country whatsoever. But at least 5 of the major track events could be considered distance races, so a cross country athlete can score you points in cross country, again during the indoor season, and once again during the outdoor season.

By now you should see where all of this leads. Good Cross Country runners are by far the best investment for any college coach. Because by competing year round, they give you three chances to compete at the championship level, and literally nobody else in the track and field community can give you that. This is why programs like Northern Arizona have figured out that by making Distance running their ultimate priority, you can not only guarantee yourself a shot at a cross country national title, but essentially a Top 25 spot both indoors and outdoors as well. It’s not that sprinters, hurdlers, jumpers, and throwers don’t matter but you’ve got to believe really strongly in giving a recruit scholarship dollars for track alone. Because they will be sitting around and watching competitions from August through to December before they ever even get a chance to score a point in a contested event. And the XC runners, will be taking no days off, because they can’t afford to. The competition schedule demands it.

If you run cross country, and everyone thinks you are crazy, the joke is on them. Your friends may have no idea what you are doing when you run a half marathon almost every Sunday. But it doesn’t matter because college coaches know exactly what you’re doing. And they value it, and they value you perhaps even a little bit higher than they do everyone else.

KNOW THE GAME. WIN THE GAME.

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