Four Down and One to go

Today finished the fourth week of N-City X-C with no one showing up. No one showed up on Wednesday either. This is worse than last year. I feel like I'm stealing their money. Oh, well.

Week 1 - 2.67 runners showed up for each practice.

Week 2 - The highlight of the season - 3.67

Week 3 - 1.75 getting worse

Week 4 - .625

Week 5 - will I be alone next week?

Exposure

Over the past year, the NJSIAA has realigned most of the high school athletic conferences in northern New Jersey. One of the new conferences is the Super Essex Conference which is comprised entirely of schools in the county. Gone are the gamesmeets against schools far away and new rivalries are now in place. The new alignment was met with some criticism as well as with praise. Anyway, the new SEC (Super Essex Conference) has been holding their dual meets at B-B-Park on Tuesdays and Wednesday. Last week, during the first week of training for N-City, the team got to see some races and today was the conference championships. They saw all of the teams in the conference as well as some of the top runners in the state.

Today we had 6 runners show up, 5 boys and 1 girl. Four of the boys showed some decent talent. A couple of them were impressed with the races and the quality of runners that they saw. They wished that we were a lot closer to entering a race. It was a good sign from this team.

The best case scenario would be that for the next 3 1/2 weeks, we get a few more runners and are able to take a nice group of runners to the CTC Championships on November 7.

Week One

This past week was the first week of training for the N-City runners in Year 2. Because of some cancellations, the team met only three times. The original sign-up sheet that was outside of the AD's office produced 50+ names. Nineteen runners of both genders have gone out of their way to get physicals, fill out forms, and turn them into the AD. Of the three days of practice, 4, 0, and 4 runners showed up. Nothing has changed at N-City!!

Of the runners who have shown up, two are veterans from last year. One ran at the CTC Championships in November '08. He is looking forward to going back. Whether we do or not depends on how much practice we get in during the next four weeks.