"The Sport Has Changed"

Gopher women Katie Moraczewski(196) and Ashlie Decker(184)
during the Griak Invitational.  Photo by Gene Niemi

"The sport has changed," said Bruce Mortenson, who has seen a lot of change in his lifetime.  Born on New Year's Eve in 1943, Mortenson  got his start in the sport at St. Louis Park High School under Coach Roy Griak, who the Griak Invitational is named after.  He went to college and was coached by another legend, Oregon's Bill Bowerman, and was the roommate of one of the journalist legends of the running world, Kenny Moore.

Mortenson was an NCAA steeplechase champion, claims he has no speed yet ran a 49.9 split during the mile relay in college, and just dipped under the 2:20 barrier as a marathoner.  He's also known for his longevity as he continued to compete well as a part of the Minnesota Masters contingent in the 1980s that was the envy of other states  (2007 interview with Mortenson by Chad Austin is HERE).

Back in his college days, he recalls, the key for a team to get to the NCAA meet was convincing the school's athletic director to spend the money to send the team.  "We weren't even an official sport at Oregon," he noted, but that didn't stop Oregon from producing national champions, Olympians, and worldwide success.  Today, the landscape has changed, not only for the colleges, but the high schools as well.

Bill Miles, the coach at Wayzata High School and before that at Cretin, now Cretin Derham-Hall, notes that priorities have changed for some programs as the season stretches into December with the Footlocker and Nike Cross Nationals.  Summer running camps, year-round training, and much less multi-sport participation for those runners who want to excel at cross country or track, says Chris Daymont, women's coach at St. Olaf in her 32nd year in that job.

Even in college, Daymont said, fewer athletes will be multisport like earlier Minnesota standouts Garrett Heath at Winona. then Stanford, and now on the pro circuit, or Bob Kempainen, who ran for Hopkins and Dartmouth and became a two-time Olympian and American recordholder in the marathon.  Both XC skied in High School in addition to running cross country and track.  Because of the intense competition kids are urged to specialize earlier to develop a resume of sorts for moving on to the network of professional training groups, such as Team USA Minnesota, once their collegiate careers are over.  Not that it doesn't happen, as at least two of the runners ranked in the top ten in Class AA in high school have or still do compete in multisports, Kevin Docherty of Cretin Derham-Hall and Osba Ali of Richfield.  It's just that the number doing it is shrinking.

For college team programs the "yardstick" is getting into the NCAA championships, whether it be for Division I , II, or III.  Instead of being dependent on the Athletic Director approving the trip, each division of the NCAA's has a set of rules that awards points and determines who gets into the NCAA championships.  The straightforward part of those rules is that the top two teams in each region get into the championships.  So 18 of the teams get to determine their fate the "old fashioned way" by performing in a single meet, the Regional championships.

The other 14 get selected by a system of points awarded for places in earlier competitions, rankings,  and the choice of those making the decisions on who gets in and who doesn't.  Daymont sits on the committee for NCAA Division III and notes that the most time seems to be spent in that committee selecting the 32nd and final team to make the Championships.  The other places usually sort themselves out throughout the season

The 14 teams vieing for those final spots are known at being "on the bubble," a fact openly acknowledged by meet organizers these days as the University of Toledo hosted a meet titled "The Inter-Regional Bubble Buster" on September 21.  This year it expanded from being a women's only race to including both men's and women's teams. The teams go into these meets in search of ranking points based on the strength of the field and how they place in the meet.

As was noted in earlier articles, the Griak meet had a drop off in the size and national ranking stature of the Division I race, thus even though the Gopher men won the competition, they dropped from third to fourth in the Central Region Division I coaches poll.  One of the reasons for the weaker Griak field was that other top events--the Notre Dame and Stanford Invitationals--were on the same weekend.

But one can't control other meet's scheduling, only who you can attract to your own event.  "We haven't done as good a job recruiting teams as we should," said Steve Plasencia, Gopher men's XC and track coach.  It's a issue they hope to  pay more attention to next year, Plasencia said. Meanwhile with the high school scene becoming more national, just being a state champion is not as valuable a credential as it used to be for college recruiters.  With the price of college going up the competition for Division I college scholarships increases as well, despite the fact that college XC and Track scholarship budgets don't compare with "revenue sports," such as football or basketball.

So, the Footlocker and Nike meets become more important in the recruiting game.  On the flip side, opportunities are still there for the "late bloomers," those who may not have been on the recruiting radar in high school, but blossom once they get to college.  So, just because they don't place high up nationally many athletes are still on coaches' "radar," as they look for kids with potential.  For example, the Gopher's top men's finisher, John Simons, thought that he "wasn't good enough" to compete at the Big Ten level so he started out at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee, built up his confidence and ability and transferred to the University of Minnesota. Saturday he led the team to the Griak championship.

So while some things change, others stay the same.  This month, for example, marked the 40th anniversary of two of the US's gold medal winners at the Munich Games in 1972.  As Frank Shorter, who won the marathon that year noted during a visit to the Twin Cities several years ago: "We were all just 4:20 milers in high school," he said of himself and teammate Dave Wottle, who won gold in the 800 meters, as well as Olympic marathon fourth place finisher and Mortenson roommate, Moore.  Moore was also a 4:20 miler in highs school, said Shorter . Wottle won his state championship(Ohio) in high school, but he didn't run 4:05 or 4:10, rather in the 4:20s.

Even though he was a state champion, Wottle only went to Bowling Green State University on a partial scholarship, a situation that changed as he broke four minutes for the mile as a sophomore and continued to develop to become a US and Olympic champion.  His main motivation being that he hated to lose, and he was willing to put in the work necessary to minimize that possibility.  The lesson being don't give up hope if you don't succeed right away, better things may lurk on the horizon.