High School Cross Country

While I praise any improvement to the coverage of indoor track, to look through both the printed edition and the on-line edition on Newsday and fail to see any references to the 2,300 male and female high school track and field athletes that competed Friday night 12/21 at the only 200 meter indoor track on Long Island does a disservice to those 2,300 athletes.

I invite one and all to come down to our Fieldhouse (corner of the LIE and Wicks Rd.) and watch an amazing array of sprinters, jumpers,hurdlers,shot putters,middle and long distance runners, both young men and young women

I think Long Islanders should know that CW Post has disbanded it's track team. The background is important to know for any potential athlete thinking of CWP,especially Track coaches,Football coaches and athletes, as well as, those athletes who play football and do track in the spring. If you are a dual sport athlete and football is one sport then CWP is not for you!
I ran for CWP from '67 to '71 and we were a national calibre team
( we beat Penn State, Harvard, Army,Georgetown,Navy...the list goes on...), with more All Americans than any other team in the history of CWP (still true today!!).
I knew the "handwriting was on the wall" when I heard that the current AD/Football Coach forbade his football players from missing spring football and doing track. I knew that that kind of narrow scope could only mean that this AD was only focused on his team and not the over all success of all CWP teams!! The next year he disbanded Men's and Women's track. This Athletic Director's limited vision of athletics fell into the prevailing and historical philosophy at CWP... that anything that detracts or takes the glory away from football must be bad! CWP Track rose to the highest level of any team in the history of the college,(any team!) and that was apparently too much for the Athletic Department and Football coaches to accept and through the years they took away virtually all the available scholarship money and refused to siupport the teams. Our proud history of accomplishments included dozens of All-Americans from the football program also but that also was not relevant! The track was never repaired through the years and even the well supported football program has stopped playing the likes of Northeastern, Lehigh and our formally traditional rival Hofstra. They destroyed the one team(Track) that gave them national glory and major recognition to now be dwindled down to a Division 2 middle of the pack school playing schools like Assumption, Bentley,St Anselms and Pace( no offense to those fine schools or the concept of D2 or D3,but compared to Hofstra and where our Track team was , we have gone backwards in the level of competition!). If I sound bitter , I am! It's like you helped build up an award winning nationally recognized Restaurant/Hotel/Resort and a series of new managers come in and they combine their jealousy and narrow vision to diminish the most successful part of the hotel! Now instead of that reknown restaurant section you got a hot dog stand,albeit a hot dog stand with a loyal following of Alumni but still no where near what was!
The analogy may have some problems but the bottom line is Long Island and Metropolitan area athletes, especially minorities and women, were impacted by CW Post's decision to destroy the history and accomplishment's of one of Long Islands most accomplished athletic/track programs. If you dont beleive we were as big as I'm saying we were in Track, go to the Newsday archives or talk to any person who ran track in the late sixties or 70's. Heck ask any guy who played football and loved track where they wanted to go to school back in those years. CW POst was a national power and we competed with every Division 1 program and had the schools name in the news from LA to Fargo to Florida! Cutting the Track and Field program at CWP is a clear example of the "cutting off the nose to spite the face" saying, and a sad commentary on the petty jealousy in athletics.

Jack Rice...Where is this track you speak of? I agree that Track gets less coverage of late and especially the championships should be covered in Newsday!

There was also a national championship in Maryland this weekend (Nike Indoor Nationals) which many LI schools competed in-

Garden City Girls DMR- 2nd
Emily Menges, Brooke Senken, Maddie Adams, Taryn Schmelzinger

Garden City Girls 4x800m- 4th
Emily Menges, Brooke Senken, MAddie Adams, Michelle Rotondo

Mile Race Walk
Leah Bulleti (East Hampton?)- 1st
Molly Josephs (Garden City)- 5th

800m
Emily Menges (Garden City) - 4th

Mile
Jackie Marshall (Kings Park)- 3rd
Kyle Merber (HHHW)- 1st

There were many other teams there as well from LI- this is all I remember off the top of my head- Chaminade's 4x800m team placed as as did their 4x1 mile team.

results are at: http://nikeindoor.nationalscholastic.org/

Thanks