With COVID-19 cancelling most of my junior track season, I may not have a chance to get a good race this season. Will it be too late to contact coaches during my senior XC season to get recruited?
Everyone is in the same boat. You’ll be fine.
This is an unprecedented situation so it’s really hard to predict how it will affect recruiting. Typically recruits would be in touch with coaches junior year or following junior track season, prereads would happen in the summer, visits would be scheduled for fall, and coaches would be refining the recruiting board from summer through fall, offering admissions support to top recruits in the late summer early fall period. (This is the General timeline at Ivies, NESCACs, selective D3s where most recruits apply ED). Usually in that scenario, senior XC performances aren’t a big part of the equation. In general coaches don’t like to rely on XC times anyway due to course and condition variation. Placing at big meets does carry weight but that usually happens too late in the season to help seniors focused on this group of schools.
With the spring season canceled, it’s hard to know what will happen. Some coaches will look at indoor track marks more than usual, others will try to project based on sophomore times, others might weight senior XC times more heavily. Probably some combination of these. But my guess is that athletes who had a chance to get indoor marks will be at an advantage this recruiting cycle. Although if you do really well at your nxn or fl regional I’m guessing the coaches will find a way
It’s also possible that some of the internal processes used for recruits at these schools will be adjusted next fall (for example, extending ED dates for athletes or giving coaches more pull during RD). And, of course, the vast majority of distance runners commit later in the year and not to the relatively small group of academically selective schools that follows the timeline I mentioned.
Really all a distance runner can do at this point is keep training and start communicating with coaches. They know the situation and will probably be forthcoming about how they’ll proceed. They’re also pretty good at projecting potential off sophomore times, junior XC performance. Good luck!
My S hadn’t really zeroed in on where he wanted to go during the summer and we were still reaching out to coaches during early XC. It wasn’t until he visited 2 schools in the fall that he really found what he was looking for. (This is D3, UAA). The coaches did not pressure him to apply ED (the NESCAC coaches did, and that turned him off as he wasn’t ready to commit). He applied to one school RD and the other ED2; got into the ED2 school, and never looked back. If you’re looking at D1 it’s probably different but everyone will be in the same position.