Seeing NCAAs from overseas
The basics of what I have to say about the NCAA Division I cross country championships are now online.
There are a few interesting things about this story which aren’t evident when you take it at face value. The first is the audience it’s written for. If I was writing for a predominately U.S. audience, I would be featuring the team victories. I would be quoting coaches Vin Lananna and Greg Metcalf extensively. And I would have described in greater detail the team strategies and moves within the race which brought both teams to victory. Outside the USA, however, the majority of athletics fans don’t care about this. A minority of them have team allegiances or even know which teams are which, and a majority of top-ranked internationalists now arrive at the big events without first going through the NCAA mill.
The second interesting thing is that the report has been linked, visually, with the World Cross Country Championships in the IAAF’s system. This might have happened anyway, but Alison wisely suggested to me that I mention the performance of a few runners who may make the USA Junior team for World Cross, and I did so. In the view of a European observer of the sport, that may be one of the most interesting parts of the story.