Nike Vs Footlocker Cross Country Championships
posted by rtsam on December 9, 2009, 11:04pm

Watching the Nike Cross Nationals (NXN) online this past weekend, I couldn't help but think the writing was on the wall for the Foot Locker Cross Country Championships.  Despite it being the de facto individual national championships for 30 years, its location in beautiful San Diego, and its resonance in the minds of most athletes, the Nike meet is sure to take the upperhand in the near future.
The big differentiating factor, as you all probably know, is Nike's emphasis on crowning a team champion alongside the individual champion.  Rather than four regional races and ten individuals each, Nike holds eight regionals and takes the top two teams from each region to Portland for the championship race (plus a few others from California).  Since 2008, the top five individuals on non-qualifying teams are also invited to compete.  What started out as Nike creating a team championship to complement Foot Locker's individual championship is now a head-to-head competition to get the best athletes to their races.


And that's exactly why Nike's going to win this battle.  When push comes to shove, every top athlete with a chance to race with their team will choose to do so.  At its heart, cross country is a team sport.  In fact, outside of perhaps ekiden races (which are almost exclusively run in Japan), cross country is the only truly team-oriented sport in all of distance running, and maybe endurance sports as a whole. 

For 25 years, it was fine that we only had an individual championship.  Foot Locker (formerly Kinney) answered one of the two big questions in high school cross country, and gave the sport the one "national championship" in all of high school sports (to this day, there is no national championship in any other sport).  But in a team sport, an individual championship is like the welterweight title in boxing.  It's valid, it's relevant, it's something we all enjoy seeing decided, but it's not the...(cue Michael Buffer)..."heavyweight champion of the world!"  It just isn't.  The big title is the team title, and it's fine if Foot Locker was never in a position to answer that question.  But the fact that Nike is, and that they are providing a competing belt--the WBC to Foot Locker's WBA, if you will--for the individual title, has got Foot Locker in a pinch.  I don't expect Foot Locker to go away any time soon, and part of me hopes they get creative and put up a fight with Nike, but they'll be hard pressed to do so without a team element.  I feel like they need to have all the top individuals to stay relevant, not half, not most, all of them.  I don't know how they can do this...maybe delay their races by a week?  They'll need to do something, especially with Nike pulling out all the stops to make NXN the premier high school cross country championship in the country.