Suggestion to eliminate teams from state championship met with nationwide resistance

by Dave Devine, DyeStat ESPN RISE - January 22, 2010
Photos by Dave Clark, Robert Rosenberg and Andy Kiyokawa


It was the committee report read around the running world. 

Or at least the committee report bullet point.  

Nested in an otherwise mundane collection of minutes from a Monday meeting of the Oregon School Activities Association (OSAA) State Championship Committee were these words:

The committee is investigating...[r]eformatting of Cross Country and Golf Championships to eliminate the team qualifying aspect of the event. A predetermined number of individuals would qualify through a regional or sectional event.

The intimation that Oregon—the state of Dellinger, Bowerman, Prefontaine and Hayward Field—would consider eliminating the team component of the state cross country meet set off a firestorm in the close-knit running community, not simply within the borders of the Beaver State, but across the nation.  Running websites like RunnerSpace.com and LetsRun.com spread the word on site postings and message boards, while social networking sites like Facebook spiderwebbed the news across the United States and beyond.

In the two weeks since those January 11th meeting minutes were posted on-line at the OSAA website and distributed to Oregon school officials, what originated as a “discussion item” for the next State Championship Committee meeting on February 1st has snowballed into an ever-widening campaign which has left the OSAA offices inundated with phone calls, emails and letters.

On January 15th, RunnerSpace.com posted a paraphrase of the bullet point from the minutes, referring to the possibility of eliminating team qualifying from the state meet, but did so beneath a headline which read, End of High School Team Cross Country in Oregon.  An accompanying subhead added a question mark to those same words, but the main headline was the attention-grabber. Shortly after, the widely-read running site LetsRun.com—a site not exactly known for hyperbolic restraint—ran a link to the RunnerSpace page under the headline: This Is For Real - They're Axing Team XC In OREGON.  Friday morning, in connection with an unrelated news item about a controversy surrounding the NCAA Outdoor Championships at the University of Oregon, LetsRun had morphed the news further: First They Try To Ban HS XC, Now This…

If the members of the OSAA State Championship Committee were wondering how participants and fans of Oregon high school cross country felt about their sport, they were about to find out.

An on-line petition has gathered more than 1600 signatures, with....