What considerations are unique to the world of women’s track and field scholarships?

Having discussed track and field scholarships in general in the last in the previous installment, we now turn our attention to the topic of women’s track and field scholarships.

A few caveats are in order. I come to this discussion from the perspective of the high school coach. Jay Johnson comes from the perspective of the college coach and recruiting coordinator. As such, we don’t necessarily see all the same things.

It’s also the case that my experience with female athletes who have received track and field scholarship offers is rather extensive. That experience will help me to speak from experience about many issues on the women’s side of the ledger. I will need to rely much more heavily on Jay Johnson when we discuss men’s track and field scholarships in the next installment.

Finally, please take the content of this article with a grain of salt. There are no hard and fast rules about who or what level of performance gets a particular level of scholarship. Everything is subject to the idiosyncracies of the particular situation.

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Any sheet you might have seen stating that such-and-such a performance puts an athlete in line for a full-ride scholarship should be treated with a healthy dose of skepticism. Anything you may have heard about minimum standards to get any sort of scholarship is equally baseless.

I know of a 24:xx high school cross country runner who received a fairly substantial athletic scholarship to a community college. I know of a 13.0x 100-meter sprinter who got athletic scholarship money to attend a Division I institution (and this was no obscure DI school). I still scratch my head over both situations and wonder what the respective college coaches knew–or possibly thought they knew–that I didn’t.

A track and field scholarship is least as much about matching desires with opportunity as it is about performances and sliding scales of awards.

I’ve been stunned by the size of some scholarship offers made to athletes I did not regard as top-tier athletes–some of my own athletes and some athletes coming out of programs that my friends coach. Similarly, I’ve been surprised by some comparatively small offers made to athletes I considered to be top-tier prospects. As I mentioned earlier, the rules are anything but hard and fast.

To illustrate how across-the-board offers can be, I’ll discuss of few of the details of two offers one of my former high school athletes received. A major Division I program offered her a substantial athletic scholarship, in excess of 80% of the price of tuition, room and board, and expenses. That school also indicated they’d likely be able to cover most of the rest through academic financial aid normally extended to students of her standing. The same girl was offered what amounted to about a 40% scholarship from a Division II institution.

In this case, the Division II offer was illustrative of a reality faced by numerous scholarship-worthy high school athletes.

In a conversation with the coach at that school, I learned that the program had very little scholarship money to offer that year. Most importantly, it was a low year in their cycle of available scholarship money. Things sometimes work out that way.

They had committed a large amount of money the previous year and those women were a long way from being ready to graduate. Only a couple of scholarship athletes were graduating and no scholarship athletes had left the program that year. Additionally, the school had taken a couple of non-scholarship athletes who had performed well and signed them to partial athletic scholarships for the upcoming year. Consequently, the school had about 1.0 available scholarships to offer to incoming freshmen and they wanted to spread that amount across at least four or five athletes.

My athlete could have been Octavious Freeman or Chelsey Sveinsson and she still would not have approached anything like a full ride from that school. As it was, a 40% scholarship offer represented a substantial vote of confidence from the program.

If you have your heart set on attending a particular school, this story could very well end up being your story. It’s not necessarily a reflection on what you accomplished in high school; it’s a reflection of the current realities within the track and field program at that school.

If, however, a female with a nice running, jumping, or throwing resume is willing to consider multiple schools, the likelihood of a very nice scholarship offer increases dramatically.

As indicated in the preceding article, the supply of track and field scholarships is greater for women than it is for men. And, the demand on that larger number of scholarships is smaller. It’s a cold, hard fact of life that a lower percentage of female than male high school track and field athletes want to go on to compete in college. This situation creates opportunity, and lots of it, for the women who do want to compete.

Without meaning to cast suspicion on what I said before about there being no hard-and-fast rules about certain performances attaching to certain levels of scholarship offers, my experiences suggest that 5K cross country times in the low 18s (at altitude) begin to put a female athlete in line for full-ride consideration. Below 18 minutes and the likelihood that at least one school makes a full-ride offer starts to increase dramatically. Any high school girl who can run sub-20 should be able to attract some scholarship offers somewhere, even at the Division I level. Choices and amounts may be limited, but there are many programs happy to bring in a sub-20 kind of athlete.

I assume those times need to be a little faster for athletes from lower altitudes, though I have been dumbstruck a time or two by the realization that there are a few college coaches from lower altitudes who indicate no appreciation of the effect that altitude has on distance running. To the extent that these coaches recruit by standards of performance, they apply the same standards to athletes from higher and lower elevations. It sometimes worries me that there may be other gaps in the understanding of distance running in the minds of these coaches.

All that said, track times are more important than cross country times, places in big meets are more important than times (at least for cross country), and your relationship with your high school coach matters. Very rarely will a high school coach make it a point to obstruct an athlete’s scholarship opportunities, but successful college coaches do learn to decipher the coded language high school coaches use to indicate an athlete is a disruptive influence or lacks a strong work ethic.

If you’re a female throwing the shot put in the high 30s, you have reason to believe you could have a portion of your college expenses paid for by an athletic scholarship. Reach into the 40s and both the probability and the size of the offer go up–fast.

About 5-5 starts getting serious attention in the high jump. 58-low or faster in the 400. Sub 2:18 in the 800. Over 17 feet in the long jump. Somewhere in the 15s in the 100 hurdles (I am aware there’s a lot of difference between a 15.0 and a 15.9, but I’m similarly aware that I’m not a hurdle guy, so I’ll stick with “somewhere in the 15s.”). 25.xx in the 200. Maybe not at Texas A&M or Oregon, but somewhere in Division I.

Should you abandon all hope if you’re not a threat to attain these marks? Absolutely not, especially not if the passion to run as a scholarship athlete courses through your veins. And the standards–vague and indefinite as the are–are typically even more generous at the Divsion II level.

Particularly if a school has a football program, the athletic department at that school is under intense pressure to maintain the sort of gender equity required by Title IX. This implies that the school will do all they can to bring as many women as they can (within reason, of course) into their athletic programs. Claims that athletic scholarships are routinely extended to warm bodies are mostly exaggerated, but the reality is a very large percentage of girls who regularly place in big invitational meets in high school can also earn athletic scholarship money for college.

It must be understood that the standards for an athletic scholarship at a school like Florida State are much higher than the standards at a school competing in a lower-tier conference. The demonstrated success of certain coaches creates demand to be a part of those programs. Demand drives up the “cost” of getting into the programs. In these cases, the standards for a scholarship may turn out to be extraordinarily high. The vast majority of DI and DII programs, however, provide extensive scholarship opportunities for females coming out of high school cross country and track and field programs.

If the first school you’re interested in doesn’t make an offer, there are many other schools out there with the academic programs you’re interested in. Keep knocking on doors. Keep filling out prospect athlete questionnaires at schools that have what you want in a college. Be willing to make a few phone calls.

This point would apply equally to men as to women, but you should understand the pecking order of scholarship offers. Most schools will target certain recruits and make offers to those recruits, giving them some sort of limited time frame to respond. Until those athletes respond (and there may be two or three layers of these athletes), the offers extended to those targeted athletes typically tie up a large portion of the available scholarships at that school.

If you do not have an offer before National Letter of Intent signing day, it does not necessarily mean you will not get an offer from that school. It does, however, mean you’re not at the top of their list of recruits. Nevertheless, the coach should be good enough to explain a little of where you stand to you and give you some indication of when they might be able to make an offer, if they’re able to make an offer at all.

College coaches who fail to exercise this basic level of human decency have turned off a great many more athletes, parents, and high school coaches than they know. Most of us are okay with knowing we’re not at the top of someone’s list for athletic scholarship–an athletic scholarship offer is not a proposal for marriage. Most of us, however, are not okay with being strung along. Unfortunately, some college coaches string prospects along.

If you’ve been in contact with a program, have had a conversation or two with the coach about running for them, perhaps even made a visit, and you’ve heard nothing about a scholarship amount by the first week in February, you should either a) prepare yourself to be content to walk on, or b) figure no offer is coming and direct your hopes elsewhere. The college coach should already have told you that in a diplomatic sort of way, but some don’t.

For students willing to push out the date of a college commitment, many scholarship offers are routinely made late in a student’s senior year. I’ve received numerous phone calls and e-mails in the April/May time frame inquiring if we have any quality athletes in our program who’ve not yet committed to a school. In some cases, the amount of scholarship money still on the table has been rather substantial.

On a final note, several high school track and field/cross country athletes turn to recruiting services for help finding scholarship offers. There is little doubt that reputable recruiting services can generate offers, often multiple offers, for many athletes. It should be understood going in, however, that most of those offers tend to come from lower-tier programs that generally have difficulty filling their allotments of available scholarships.

There are undoubtedly many cases where the particular schools and athletes turned out to be great matches. In other cases, however, the match may be more problematic. In any case, be willing to seriously investigate the opportunities for you at both the school itself and within its track and field program when considering a scholarship offer generated through a recruiting service.

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I’m going to go out on a limb and say that for most readers of this article (and series) the most important two sentences that Alan shared with you are the following, “It’s a cold, hard fact of life that a lower percentage of female than male high school track and field athletes want to go on to compete in college. This situation creates opportunity, and lots of it, for the women who do want to compete.”

I hope this has been helpful and, as Alan said, please take my comments with a grain of salt.

One word is “Hundun” which in Taoist philosophy means “the uncarved block.” I found the following explaination at the Aisa for Educators site by Columbia University (where Joseph Campbell attended, ran on the track team and once experienced an epiphany).

For Daoists the philosophical equivalent to the pre-imperial primordium is a state of chaotic wholeness, sometimes called hundun, roughly translated as “chaos.” In that state, imagined as an uncarved block or as the beginning of life in the womb, nothing is lacking. Everything exists, everything is possible: before a stone is carved there is no limit to the designs that may be cut…

Last Friday was the fifth day of sanctioned high school cross country practice in the state of Colorado and it was also the first day of practice with my newest charge, Tyler McCandless. Those two items, coupled with Vern Gambetta’s post on how his friend, Kenyon College swimming coach Jim Steen starts each year from scratch, as if he knows nothing, as if the 31 straight DIII men’s swimming titles came from three decades of dumb luck, lead me to do the same. The concept of the Hundun was the obvious thought my squiggly (and hopefully pliable) synapses produced.

So this is the starting from scratch, pretending I know nothing (not that hard) and hoping this post is useful for the high school coaches officially starting their season.

My job as a post collegiate coach is as follows:

1. Keep the athlete healthy. A healthy runner can run more days in a week, more weeks in a month, more months in a year. This leads to consistency. Consistency in distance running may be the most important aspect of running. Related is the idea that an injury is a training error. Or to be blunt, if they get hurt it’s my fault.

2. We need to run hard. Intensity, quality, what ever you want to term it, is extremely important and the only way the athlete can realize their full athletic potential as a distance runner is to do a great deal of running hard. (Note: I’m not concerned with the exact physiological definition of this – percentage of VO2max, meters run at 5k pace or miles run at half marathon pace – but rather the simple concept that some running is hard and some running is easy and that we want to do a lot of running hard).

3. The balance of 1 and 2 is akin to making a killer salad, balancing salt and acidity, finding the right amount for each ingredient in that particular salad. When it’s done well it’s so good, so obvious that I deceive myself by thinking that I’ll get back to my kitchen be able to easily replicate that salad, yet I rarely can. When it goes wrong it’s often hard to find that exact spot where the act of combing the ingredients went wrong. This is the view from which I want to view previous year’s logs.

4. Consider stealing more analogies from Thomas Keller as I like the third point and it’s verbatim what he says about salads in Ad Hoc. Someday I’ll post on how his view of distilling a dish down to one or two elements helped me understand how the weight room works in a week’s cycle.

5. Remember that Thomas Keller spent two years (give or take) working at a job where everyday he had to make hollandaise. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it broke. After days and days of practice he could make it right every time…after he had broken a few sauces. He has a feel in the kitchen. I need to have a feel out at the track. I should not coach off of excel sheets, but rather look at the athlete and listen to them (knowing that they lie and want to do more) and then give them the next logical step in their workout, in their progression towards a greater level of fitness.

6. Because I believe a better athlete is a better runner then they need to become better athletes. I’ve likely taken this too far in the past and I need to do a better job of, as Vern Gambetta often says, “the need to do vs. the nice to do.” (His friend Gary Winkler said it in this interview as well). What is the need to do?

…I’ll leave that to a separate post as I want to keep thinking macro and my head starting to hurt as I was drilling down to the micro. Stay tuned…

7. While all post collegiate athletes are intrinsically motivated to train and train hard, do the best job I can at looking at the macro-cycles and figuring out how hard we can push for how long. That said, this is hard to do and I don’t think anyone has this dialed in. Related: injuries likely come when you’ve pushed past the threshold of organic motivation, their natural motivation to train hard and race. Fatigue is the issue.

8. Volume. I know – wait, I think – two of the athletes I work with need to run more. But maybe they don’t. Maybe they need to run more of their current volume hard. Or maybe they just need to run the hard volume they were running harder.

…wow, it’s really hard to do pretend I’m staring from scratch as I already had my plan for volume and intensity pretty well planned out, at least for one athlete. But this is good and this is the point of the exercise. So back to the list later this week.

Obviously I’ll be happy to answer questions you have about this workout. I think circuits are a great way to get ready for a fall marathon or for high school athletes to gain fitness in the opening weeks of the cross country season (the “danger zone” as my college coach liked to say) and if I can be of help simply ask your question below.

As I promised the campers, below are the resources I referenced in my talk and all of the exercises we did during the session outside. First are the slides from the presentation, then the videos follow.

Lunge Warm-Up

Dynamic Warm-Up (click here to read an article on the subject).

Lateral Lunge Warm-Up

Everything else can be found at RunningTimes.com‘s general strength progression that I produced for them a year ago. You can click here to read the progression, which is organized by hard days and easy days. This afternoon we did elements of the leg circuits and we did elements of Myrtl and Cannonball cool-downs, all of which are in the general strength videos at RunningTimes.com.

Thanks again to everyone at the camp for your energy and I hope to be able to come back to camp in the future.

…and some funny running attire too.

Thanks to Patrick for all of his hard work this week – he’s been a tremendous addition to the camp.

Running easy on your easy days is a simple concept, yet many runners struggle with it.

Check out this podcast and forward to the 3:50 mark of the podcast where Brent Vaughn talks about running easy in college, when others did not. Also, and this may be the key to this podcast for young runners, at the 4:20 mark Brent points out that every workout day he’d go confirm with his coach, Mark Wetmore, the assigned pace for the day, making sure there was no miscommunication. Simple task, confirming with you coach what the plan is for the day, yet most athletes don’t do think they need to do that, assuming they clearly know what they’ve been assigned. I love that Brent did that his last couple of years at CU.
(Note: Brent doesn’t ask me that often what the assignment is because we’re so often trying to go off of feel. Plus, I’m writing this in June and I’m likely forgetting all of the runs in the fall and the winter when I did have help him figure out what I wanted. But often it was just putting a cap on the workout, placing a time/pace/rhythm past which we wouldn’t be running faster than (i.e. before the half marathon not much work was done faster than 4:40 pace, roughly 61:30 for 21.1k, because we thought that would be a very good performance and anything faster was just risking consistency for a somewhat unrealistic half marathon debut)

If you want to read a bit more on this check out this post on the NikeRunning.com site.

Take it easy.

I’ve had several good questions about the video and article and for that reason we’ll make this a series of posts.

You can read James Carney’s blog for his opinion of the 2010 Bolder Boulder.