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Coach Joe English

It isn’t often that I get back to something that I’ve written about so soon afterward, but just last week I wrote a post talking about the strange logic that seems to pervade the awards process in running events. In that article, I discussed two situations where the overall winners of races, somehow were either not recognized or given lower awards for their performances.

It happened again today, as I fear it commonly does, but this time it happened in a way that really struck a nerve with me.

Here’s how the situation unfolded. In this small 5K race that I ran today, awards were going to be given in the following categories:
— Top 3 overall men
— Top 3 overall women
— Top 3 overall kids

Now one of the things that Coach Dean and I often talk about is watching out for the fast high-schoolers out there. They can be quick and there were some fast ones in the field today. As the race unfolded and just afterward, I thought about how the orgnizers might handle the situation if some of the “kids” would finish in the overall medals. Would they give them both awards — as overall winners and kids winners?

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