Since when do high school track meets last eight hours?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I have to get up in four hours. So, why, you ask, am I up posting?

Because my son is not home from school yet!

We’re taking Ivyboy to St. Augustine Saturday for a Flagler College open house. It’s about a two hour drive, we have to be there at eight, so we figure we leave at 5:30am, which means I need to get up at 4:30am.

Except today, after school, was Ivyboy’s first track meet. It was an away game, and if his little sister’s track meets were any indication, he’d be home by 8p or 9p.

I’m lying in bed at 8:30pm, visions of car crashes and kidnappings dancing in my head because he’s not home yet, so I drive to the school (literally right around the corner) to see what’s going on.

One of the teachers says they won’t be home before 10p. Wow, says I, going home and leaving it to Ivylad to drive up to get him so I can go to bed.

I bolt awake at 12:15a. No Ivyboy, and now, no Ivylad, who is not answering his cell phone.

I get dressed and rush up to the school, where Ivylad is sitting in the car joined by a few other parents in parked cars. Apparently, they had 19 schools show up at this meet, so they wouldn’t be home before midnight. (Ivylad’s cell phone was in the car I was driving, which is why he didn’t answer it.)

It’s not a final track meet! It’s the start of the season! Who the hell organized this mess?

I’m going to bed. Fortunately everyone else can sleep in the car on the way up.

2

Back in my track days (about 6 years ago) dual meets (at least two, but usually three teams) lasted maybe 2 hours at most. For bigger meets we could be talking anywhere from 3 hours to half a day.

Are you sure that 19 schools just “showed up” or did that fact just not get back to you. Generally you have to register for meets way in advance (liability and stuff). :confused: I’m sorry, I’ll still trying to wrap my head around this. Maybe I should get to bed…

Hope the kid did well.

3

There are track “meets”, which usually involve only two or three schools. And then there are “invitationals”, which involve many, and can take a long time.

In this day and age, where we are talking a lot about academic achievement, I can’t believe we still have high school athletics that require this much time committment.

4

Aren’t there regulations about how late a school event is allowed to go? Even if the school itself doesn’t have one, I could have sworn that the whatever the high school equivalent of the NCAA was had pretty strict rules about the duration of sporting events.

My father coached high school track for about 35 years and I don’t think he ever once had a meet go that long, including states and invitationals. Even the winter track meets that started at 7:30pm and had 10 teams going at once (only one town in our league had an indoor track, so to save time and money they did five simultaneous one-on-one meets) all finished by 10:30.

5

This is his first year in track, so for this first meet (it was an invitational, and yes 19 schools were invited, and apparently it was poorly run, with races getting started late) Ivyboy got to wear the uniform and sit on the sidelines, cheering his teammates. All was not lost, however, as he says he did get to chat with a very cute girl for 3 and a half hours. :smiley:

They did not get back to the school until 1:30am. That’s 1:30 in the fricking morning, as of the meet started at 4:30p on Friday and did not finish until the next day!

Apparently, the coach told the kids that when they got into their parents’ cars, they were to tell their folks, “No, this will not happen again.”

In other news, Flagler College is an absolutely beautiful little school with about 2000 students, but they do not offer courses that Ivyboy is interested in. He thought it was a waste of time, until we pointed out that he did learn a lot about college admissions, what they are looking for, and that he needs to look for further information in what his (hopefully) potential employers are exactly looking for. He wants to be a computer game designer, and Computer Game Design is not exactly a major. I told him to call EA Sports (they have offices in Orlando) to see what they look for on resumes.

Sorry for all the parentheses. I am exhausted and I’m waiting for the pizza delivery man to get here so I can eat and go to bed.

6

Track meets? Hell, when my son was in high school they had weightlifting meets that could run 6 hours or longer.

That’s a single activity, held indoors, with 2-3 competitions being held simultaneously.

7

It’s surprising to see an invitational being held after school. They should’ve had it on a Saturday. That’s also way too much time for 19 teams. The organizers clearly had their heads in a place no head should be.

8

He didn’t get to do any events? Because when I did track, everyone could do whatever event they wanted. The way scoring works in track and field is such that there is no reason to not put as many people as you can in an event, unless the meet itself has a limit to the number of entrants. And being that it was a 19 (!) school invitational, this may have been the case.

But yeah, an invitational as an after school meet? Usually they are saturday affairs. Hell, I did a state wide decathalon for two years and it went two whole days (it was also a girls’ heptathalon.)

9

Yeah, that’s what was throwing me. I can remember running one invitational after school, but it was something like seven schools and only went about 3 hours.

10

He’s training in high hurdles and the 300m race, but the coach didn’t want him to actually race yet. He’s still “in training.”

No, it was definitely after school on Friday, there were 19 schools at the meet, and my son’s coach knew it was seriously f’ed up, considering what she told the kids to tell their parents.

He has another meet Monday after school. Hopefully he’ll be home at a decent hour.

11

This is why I absolutely hated track and field when I was your son’s age. To make matters worse, I was distance, which is usually the last event held. Those invitationals just drag on and on. That plus the fact that distance events consisted of running around and around in circles getting tired and winding up in the same place you started. Too much like real life, ya’ know?

I finally stopped running track and concentrated on Cross Country, which appealed to my youthful hippy nature much more than track.