A Modest Proposal to Fix High School Sports

This is sound and should be implimented.  Better yet, let us apply it to all levels of running sport.

In high school top talents are still years away from peak performance and in fact true peak -performance kicks in at agers 28 to 32 if you do it right.  We actually overtrain young players while they are still maturing and this induces injuries.

Learning how to train spares us injuries in exchange for steady improvement  and all important strenthening of tendons.

Running sports actually supports all the other sports anyway so yes all should be learning to train themselves.

I would also think in terms of age and even weight classes and run twenty for every event.  what is clear is that all can participate and skill training is reserved for special teams..

A Modest Proposal to Fix High School Sports

Is there a way to support the top athletes without alienating everyone else?

Malcolm Gladwell

I was in Eugene, Oregon, last week to watch the World Track and Field Championships. And I spent a wonderful evening with a bunch of people involved with Citius Magazine, which is a media startup focused on track and field. (The single best guide to the championships, by the way, were the Citius podcasts: virtually every athlete of note made their way to the Citius Airbnb for a post-race interview.

In my evening out with the Citius crew, we discussed—as track fans often do—different ideas for promoting our sport. And I want to share my idea, which, in the week since I’ve been back, I’ve become obsessed with.

If you aren’t a track fan, stay with me! Because there’s a larger principle at stake here that I think is worth exploring.

Let’s start with this question: What are high school sports for?

I think most of us would give three answers to that:

To prepare those with elite ability for post-high school competition.

To provide an opportunity for students to experience the joy that comes from exercise and competition.

To lay down life-long habits of physical activity.

I think American high schools do a really good job with Number 1. I think they do a so-so job with Number 2, and because they do a so-so job with Number 2, they do a lousy job with Number 3.

The fundamental problem is that the first goal—to develop elite athletes—is in contradiction to the second two. To the extent that we cater to the 90th percentile, we make a sport psychologically forbidding to the 50th percentile. I mean, if your high school has four tennis players who have been honing their topspin forehands and kick-serves for 10 years, why would someone who grew up playing with their siblings on public courts on the weekends want to try out for the team? It would be an invitation to humiliation. And if we require everyone who wants to play tennis to do the kind of exhaustive preparation necessary to return 100-mph serves, then we’ve chased away anyone who needs to hold down an after-school job, whose parents can’t afford tennis camp, or who thinks there is more to life than hitting tennis balls over and over and over again.

If average athletes are intimidated from trying out for their high school teams, then recruiting the majority of students in pursuit of goals 2 and 3—fostering the joy of exercise and encouraging lifelong habits—becomes much harder. I think we can codify this contradiction into an iron law. In an act of pure self-aggrandizement, I’m going to name it for myself. Gladwell’s Law: In any sporting endeavor, elite achievement comes at the cost of mass participation.

The question is then: Is there a way to serve the top without alienating the middle? Is there some way around Gladwell’s Law?

I don’t think that it's an exaggeration to say that this is a hugely important question. Most developed nations have rising life expectancy. In the United States, life expectancy, incredibly, is falling—due, at least in part, to the resolutely sedentary nature of the American population. We need to start laying down better habits of physical activity fast. So is there a solution? I think there is. And it involves high school cross country.

I won’t belabor the obvious about cross country. It is insanely fun. Races take place during the glory days of fall. The courses are typically in beautiful parts of the country. Cross country meets don’t feel like sporting events; they feel like outdoor festivals—except everyone is fit, as opposed to high. Everyone should be so lucky as to run cross country.

Except one thing. At present, cross country is as much a prisoner of Gladwell’s Law as any other competitive high school sport. Here’s how a typical cross country meet works. Schools field a team of a half-dozen runners or so—the top five of whom count for scoring purposes. A team’s score is the sum total of the finishing places of those top five. There are some variations on the scoring system from state to state. But in its simplest form, if your athletes finish 1st, 3rd, 7th, 10th, and 11th, your team has 32 points. The school with the lowest score wins the meet.

That system falls squarely into the trap we’ve been describing. It rewards a small group at the top, and pretty much ignores everyone else. It is virtually impossible for any school to win a cross country championship without placing at least one runner in the top 10. For example, last year’s New York State high school boys’ cross country champion team was Corning, whose top five runners placed 1st, 4th, 15th, 22nd, and 40th. If you were a mediocre runner, would you go out for the Corning cross country team? I doubt it. You couldn’t keep up in practice. And you wouldn’t matter. Corning sent eight runners to the state championships, and its eighth-place finisher, a young man named Ryan, was over 2 minutes slower than its best runner. Was anyone even watching when Ryan crossed the line? A sport that focuses its reward structure entirely on the top five finishers limits attention to those top five finishers. By the time Ryan came across the line, the championship was already decided. These are the dispiriting consequences of Gladwell’s Law. Ryan feels like an also-ran.

Fortunately, however, there’s a way to fix the problem. Let’s make the Ryans of the world count.

Here’s my idea. A new race format that I want to call a Pied Piper (since, if you think about it, the Pied Piper was really a very early standard bearer for mass participation). In a Pied Piper race, the number of scoring runners is increased from five to 20. (I’m open to making that number higher, if anyone’s up for it.) And scoring is not done by adding up people’s order of finish, but rather by adding up total team times. Why? Because those two changes fundamentally change the psychological dynamic of the competition.

First, by expanding the number of scorers from five to twenty, we’ve greatly extended the duration of uncertainty about who the will team will be. Under the current system, the team competition is often decided within a minute or so of the winner crossing the line. Now, we have to wait until the last group of runners cross the line before we know who won. And because we use time as our measure, instead of place, we’ve dramatically shifted the balance of power towards the bottom half of the team. Big numbers matter more in composite scoring systems than small numbers–and the people at the bottom half of any team put up big numbers! The best strategy for winning a Pied Piper is to help your slowest runners move from the bottom of the pack to the middle or lower middle–not to make your fastest runners even faster. If you’re the 18th- or 19th-best runner on the cross country team, now suddenly you matter. Under those circumstances, how much more willing would a runner of average ability be to join the cross country team?

The Pied Piper leaves goal Number 1 intact. The best runners still get the glory of finishing at the front. It greatly improves goal Number 2: under a Pied Piper regime, cross country teams would greatly expand their share of the high school population. And my hope is that it would do a lot for goal Number 3. Running happens to be a sport that you really can do your whole life, and a really good way to develop that habit is to produce a strong set of positive running memories from your adolescence.

Let’s deal with the obvious objections.

First, we’re just tripled the size of our cross country team. Isn’t that going to cost a lot of money? Sure. But even if we have 25 boys and 25 girls on our Pied Piper squad, that’s still no larger than a typical football team. And football teams, player for player, cost a whole lot more than a group of runners. I mean, if money’s an issue, why not just cancel football? It’s not as if that’s a sport that is particularly good at laying the groundwork for a lifetime of healthy activity.

Second, what if a team can’t come up with 20 runners? Well, I hardly doubt that this is going to be an issue. When a high school cross country coach laments the lack of runners at his or her school, what they mean is a lack of good runners. They don’t understand that the incentive structure of their sport is simply scaring away lots of potential recruits. “I think you should join our team even though you probably won’t make a difference” is a very different recruiting pitch from “I think you should join our team because you may be the difference between winning and losing.”

I’m reminded of a podcast episode I did—“The Powerball Revolution,” from Season 5 of Revisionist History—about a scheme to elect high school student councils by lottery. It turns out when you replace a normal election (i.e. a popularity contest) with wide-open random selection, lots and lots of people come out of the woodwork and throw their name in the hat. In some cases, 90 percent of the school population runs for office! We used to think that only a few students want to be on the student council. Wrong. Only a few students want to engage in a competition when they believe the likelihood of their being relevant is minimal.

Third, if this is such a great idea, why don’t other sports try it? But here’s the issue. Other sports can’t try it. You can’t triple the size of a tennis team or a swimming team or a basketball team: those are sports where participation is limited either by the cost of facilities (no one can afford to build two more pools) or the logistics of competition. A Pied Piper tennis tournament would take weeks to finish.

Only running can do this! All we need is a well-heeled corporate sponsor to step in and lead the Pied Piper revolution.

Any takers?