Just an update on Shore Coaches, and it’s not a good one.
The last varsity results posted were Boys Varsity E, a race that began at 10:30 a.m. and finished around 10:50 a.m. with the final runners. It’s now 8:50 p.m., so it’s been 10 hours since the largest cross country meet in New Jersey managed to post anything.
The only excuse they’ve given is poor internet at Holmdel County Park, which is absurd, since it’s been five hours since the last race ended – Boys J.V. A. I seriously doubt whoever is responsible for timing is still sitting at the park waiting for a better internet connection when they could have driven home and posted the results. Heck, in five hours they could have driven to Boston and posted them.
And still nothing. No explanation, no apology, no estimate on when results will be available.
Unfortunately, I won’t be able to post anything tomorrow because of my real job, so it’ll be till Monday afternoon till I have a chance to catch up on races that ended hours ago.
The real losers here are the kids. The ones who PR’d and would love to see where they finished. The ones who ran a Holmdel school record and can’t wait to see their official time. The ones who are just starting out as runners and are learning that what’s standard in other sports – finding out who won or lost and what the score was – is often unavailable in our sport.
We’ve all seen delays in results getting posted from small county or conference meets that don’t have FAT timing. We’ve all seen larger meets post results an hour or two after a meet. But in my 43 years covering track in South Jersey I have never seen anything like this.
We used to sit on rickety middle school desks at the finish line typing results into our old Radio hack laptops and we still had them available to readers faster than this, and that was 25 years ago.
This is unacceptable and it’s embarrassing and it’s a shame that such a great meet can’t figure out how to post results of races that ended 10 hours ago.
I will ask this: If you took a picture of any varsity races after Boys E please shoot them over to me in the comment section! Thanks!
From the Backstretch by Reuben Frank 