I've got a choic in what sport to do. I can do Junior High football (7th - 8th graders), or I can run Cross Country. I'm leaning towards cross-country though for a few reasons.


Cross Country -- I get in better shape for basketball. Let's me slim down a bit (I'm not fat by any means, however). Meets are right after school, doesn't eat up weekends.

Football -- Get to hit people. Builds muscle. No home games, at all. Nearest game is 45 minutes away, and farthest is twice as long. Games are all on Sunday, so it ruins the Sunday.

I'm leaning towards Cross country and working out, because I could have a good basketball year if I get ready early. And I don't want to have no Sunday weekends for 2 months straight.

Cross-Country. I did that. It was somewhat hard but it got you in great shape, and plus my team was filled with some of the most awesome people ever - and it was Co-Ed!!!!

Seriously though, there's nothing quite like running towards the finsihing line with Chariots of Fire running through your head.

Definately go with >>CC>>.

You get in way better shape doing Cross Country than you do playing Football.

Yeah, but football's better if you AREN'T a sissy.

Monoxide, this goes on during the beginning of the school year, meaning I lose half my weekend to out of town games. I like all the hitting and pumping of the muscles, but I REALLY DON'T WANNA LOSE HAVE MY WEEKEND. Besides, basketball is a bigger deal, even though I'm not gonna get anywhere with sports.

Well, there is a reason why I only did cross-country in junior high ya know...

Its for the experience and the fun, man.

I was about to say do football to get all the ladies, then I realized all the kids on the football team in my hometown are ugly as sin, and they don't even get girls playing football.

You're like 12.

You don't have a weekend.

Well I guess I'm just biased cuz our school's so small we have 2 people on our cross country team. Actually Zloc I'd so do whatever you think you're better at.

yeah, and I enjoyed it last year. But I don't wanna drive 2 hours a day to get to and from my games. I'd prolly end up being a last ditch replacement because last year I played defensive end...but the kids were smaller last year, this year, kids start getting bigger and I couldn't play line because I'd get hammered. I think I'll do cross country, and do football next year because they should have the field done by then. Right now the equipment for the new school is on the field.

I RECANT EVERYTHING!!! I DON'T WANT TO BE A CONTRIBUTING FACTOR IN THIS THREAD'S CLOSURE!

Daft, I agree with you. But don't be putting down football players. I know you weren't probably serious about the football pad comment, but kids get hurt all the time in this league. And some of the NFL's wide receiver's seem to be in good shape. Both sports require different things. But, in no way, are football players pansies.

Yes, I'm sorry I am generally totally against ranting, I apologize for breaking my own rule. I was kind of joking about the football padding as well. I still, however, feel that the point had to be made - runners are not pansies. This is a common misonception, and it bothers me to here it from people.

I did XC for three years in high school and one season college. By all means, doing XC is NOWHERE NEAR considered "sissy." It is some grueling work. Lactate threshold runs, hill repeats, long runs (1 hr - 90 min), it's all tough. But you get such a confidence booster when you complete the workout especially if you did it well. Even better is when you race and you race well.

Also, you DON'T lose your weekend at all. You race on Sat morning and you are done by 2 PM. That's for invitationals For competitions you race on the weekdays. Fridays usually are the days but it varies. The meet lasts...two hours? Fret not about your vanishing weekend. Seriously, go for cross country. You will be in excellent cardio-vascular condition and your endurance for any other sport will increase.

Who the hell remembers the stud Cross Country runner? No one.

Who the hell remembers the stud Football player? Everyone.

Do your self a favor. Play football. You will thank me later. You will get in all the shape you need playing football.

Oh, yeah, and appearances are everything. Just remember kids, it's not how you play the game, it's how you look playing it.

Ok ok ok. I fear this is going to spiral...somewhere.

Football and cross-country have their merits. I do not bag on both of those sports. They are both require great effort on the individual.

Chose whichever sport is your liking. If you chose football, then I wish you well in your sport. Play the sport because you want to play it. Don't play just because of fame and fortune or peer-pressure.

You are the one that infered that I was talking about apperance. When I use the term stud...you can be a stud in the way you play and you look. I was refering to both.
Remembering someone for there on the field work is the biggest thing.

Really, the kids that I know from varius schools most of them ran cross country sucked at everything else, even though Cross Country is hard as hell...its usually the last thing on the totem poll of "sports".

Are you fast? Do you have good hands? Know anything about football...interested in learning football? Might need to answer those till you can do it.

I apologize for my misconception.


Not so at my school. I know a number of Cross Country runners that play every other available sport season, and some of them are pretty darn good at what they do, whether it's XC, baseball, basketball, soccer, etc. But I'm glad that you admitted that Cross country is hard.

You should play rugger. That'll beef you up no end.

Oh, how I hated rugger.

Anyways, choose what you prefer. I prefer CC because I'm inept at sports and running around like a twonk is better than getting run around and ground into the ground like a twonk.

If it were my choice, I'd pick football. Then again, I'm one of those people who can't bring themselves to exercise unless they're chasing a ball. That, and I follow football fanatically but never got a chance to play organized football because my school didn't have it.

Honestly, though, it's all about what you want. If you're looking for endurance, cross-country is the obvious choice because endurance is the one area in which football players generally fall short of other athletes. If you want to build muscle, the opposite is true.

eh...



The kid in front goes to my school. He has the TN state record in the mile, 2 mile, and 3 mile XC. He placed 2nd and Footlocker XC nationals and won the Bowerman Mile at Nike Indoor Nationals. He also helped lead our XC team to one state title and our track team to three consecutive state titles.

I think he'll be remembered.



On the flip side, there weren't really any memorable football players this year.

Play football.

I am a big highschool sports buff. Hadnt heard **** about him all year. Nice accomplishments though.

By big highschool sports buff you mean what? If you knew anything about the nation's best high school distance runners over the past two years then you would have atleast heard his name (Andrew Bumbalough).

Oh, thats right... big highschool sport buffs don't pay attention to the oldest sport in the book...

USAToday.com
Rivals.com
TheInsiders.com

The 3 of the biggest high school sports web sites. I am at work and dont have access to them, but find a huge headline about him and consider myself silenced.

[EDIT] Found him. Small section about their times. Big whoopity[/EDIT]

Go with cross country, although I've never played "football" nor seen a game before.

USA Today is the only site of those three that has any track and field coverage, and you found it. The other two have plenty of Basketball and Football, but very little if anything for other sports. The home for highschool track and field online is [url]www.dyestat.com[/url]

I played football.... but then again, I was not a small person in JH. I weighed about 150-170 lbs in 7th and 8th grade. And I wasn't getting in shape for Basketball either. I was a wrestler for 6 years. Had a winning season and winning career. If you guys ever got a "Who's Who Sports Edition Yearbook" for 2002, I'm in there.

Cross country will get you into crazy shape for basketball plus, you aren't as likely to get hurt, which would ruin the hoops season for you.

Back in my hayday I used to run 50 miles a week, with two, maybe three, runs a day. I was slow (I got beat by my prom date in practices- but hey! she was like, the fastest girl on JV) but eventually I built myself up to getting a second place JV finish at one of the biggest invitationals in Montana.

Football brings with it glory. But Cross-Country brings with it friends- true friends, with complex personalities, who don't think that locker room jokes are the heighth of intellectual discourse.

Here's a great article which sums up the differences. November 2, 1973

By: Bill Lyon

This is the season of autumn Saturdays, when a thousand stadiums explode in noise and all pay homage to the great god "Shoulder Pad."

But this is the season , too, of another sport, the lonely sport, the thing they call cross-country.

The glamour and glory are for football. Guts are for cross-country.

Football Players get the ink and the adulation and the Homecoming Queen.

Cross-country runners get leg cramps and seared lungs and blisters and the dry heaves.

Football Players hear the screaming, shrieking urgings of 70,000 fanatics.

Cross-country runners hear their own rasping breathing, the pounding of blood in their head; the monotonous crunching rhythm of their own footsteps and a little voice asking maddening questions:

"Three more miles, only three more miles, spaghetti legs, and then you can rest."

"Just one more hill, now, one more hill. Are you gonna quit? C'mon, lie to your legs, tell them just a little further, just a little further and then we'll lie down.

Football has it's X's and O's and blitzes and bombs and zigouts and hitch-and-go.

Cross-country has its strategy, too. Simple. Pure. Brutal. You go out and you run.

You run until your stomach is churning with nausea. You run until your chest is on fire and there is a hornet's nest in your head. Your run until your legs weigh 400 pounds each and you run until your eyes burn and you run until your heart is a jack hammer and you run until you have the blind staggers and you wonder, why in the name of exhaustion did you ever answer the starter's gun in the first place, and you...well, run until all of this happens...and then you run some more.

Football players get helmets and pads and tape and whirlpool baths and ultraviolet rays and flashing scoreboards and TV cameras and cheerleaders and carpeted dressing rooms and a playing field that looks like it should be covering somebody's living room. Cross-country runners wear worn, baggy shorts, a shirt with holes, some floppy tennis shoes, and if they're really jazzy, maybe a sweatband around their head.

The only spectators cross-country runners attract are startled birds and squirrels and a frightened gopher or two, who watch curiously these antics of the two-legged creatures in their underwear.

The cross-country runner's stadium is a golf course and a plowed field, up the hill, down the hill, around the briar patch, through the creek and watch out for the uneven wet rocks.

Everybody knows about touchdowns and field goals and safeties, but when they announce a cross-country score and the local team is listed 18 and the visitors 43 the crowd groans because most of them still don't know that it's like golf - the low score wins.

Football players get war-sized headlines. Cross-country runners get a sentence and the agate results back there near the obituaries. When it's the third-and-one on the one yard line, with 30 seconds left in a tie game and everybody's paying attention, the PA will tell you the Michigan-Ohio State halftime score. When it's halftime and everybody's left for the restrooms and 76 trombones are blaring, the PTA will tell you that morning's cross-country result.

Why, then, ever run? Why punish and push and force your body to do all of these things before a crowd that is about the same size as the one you see when you shave in the morning?

Well, cross-country runners will tell you, when you run, you get to know yourself...the hard way.

You run and you get tired and you get a second wind and then pretty soon you're just going on guts and you're making yourself do things you never thought you could, and then it gets tougher. And when you feel like you've had the spit kicked out of you, well then it's almost euphoric.

It's as though you are no longer part of your running body. You are up and above and looking at yourself, way down deep inside, because everything has been stripped away, clear down, some say, to your very soul. It's all there for you to see.

So, if you like to look, it's simple. You keep running.

Speaking from 'experience' there eh rob???

2-a-days... I bet most runners would quit before it was over too...

Football is a entirely different kind of shape you get into.. where running just leans you down and gives you all the stamina in the world, football gives you adrenaline rushes and a better H.S. sport experience. Not discrediting runners but you do not affect each other while competeing and that is my unofficial definition of a sport. Yeah you can say this and that but you know it is true.

That is the most ***-backwards thing I have ever heard. Don't you dont know anything about the camraderie that is built in a football locker room. It is a fraternity. And your stereotype of football players being retarded jocks is not only incorrect, it is unwarranted.



You aint even lying. But that is partially do to the the physical punishment that we take COMBINED with the aerobics that is invovled.

Untrue. You can play some mean psycological games with the runner next to you. Just the mere being passed can play with your mind. Heard of drafting? I can better my performance by running a little behind and to the side of the runner ahead of me. He takes the brunt of the wind where I don't. I stay behind him just long enough and when the opportune strikes, I surge ahead and pass. That also affects the mind of the opponent.

for physical fitness do boxing.

and by physical fitness i mean kicking the crap out of all the football players and cross country runners who are arguing.

its also a sport thats highly advised by medical companies who are in dire need of patients who have mental problems.

now thats high praise.

No, no, no. Poor writing on my part, if you thought that's what it meant.

There's a different TYPE of camraderie that is built in the locker room and built running together on pristine trails during recovery days. I've experienced both. And I, personally, like the Cross Country bond-forged-through-fire better. (I used to do wrestling as well.)

And, from what everybody tells me- including Football players who have sampled the different sports- Cross Country is the third toughest sport offered at the high school level, behind Wrestling and swimming. Sure, you CAN slack off in cross country and make it easier.

But that's one of the things that makes it tough. There's nobody watching over you to make sure you run your hardest. That's up to you, to your own mental toughness. You're your own coach, cracking your own whip.

And two a days- most XC runners are encouraged to do 2-a-days everyday. Sometimes waking up at 5:00 in the morning for multiple mornings to do so. Like I said, on Sundays, I used to do three-a-days. Because it was my rest day.

If you want to take football into H.S., then go with football.

Otherwise, CC.

Oh, and Ubuu, although football studs are remembered, only a few football players on a team will be football studs. At my H.S., it was just the quarterback. No one else noticed the others to the same degree.

Cross Country. I did it for one season, and then did Indoor Track for a season, and the after effects are just plain astounding.

I don't know about other schools, but I know at mine, everyone who signs up gets to run. You don't get cut from the Cross Country team; we had 98 people for Indoor Track.

Running will build up almost all of the muscles in your body, and it will condition you for a lot of things. If you have a good coach, but really if you just have good teammates who keep pushing you farther and help you along, it'll be amazing.

Running conditions your body against the weather. You'll increase your willpower in other areas; you've run in rain, snow, sleet, ice, heat. You've run on streets, in the woods, on tracks, inside, outside, up hills, down hills, across plains and flats you didn't think would ever end. After you've done - conquered - that, anything else you do will be easy. In a few years you'll be outside in the middle of winter in a T-shirt and shorts, and everyone around you will be bundled under sixteen layers of clothes, and they'll look at you like you're insane. (Well, you are for running Cross Country, but it's a good insane.) You just look back and say "Pfft. I remember when I ran 8 miles in weather 10 degrees colder than this, and it was raining."

It'll build up your muscles. Your thighs, calfs, abs, and upper body (not a whole lot, but a good bit). You'll get into great shape. If you stay on the team, you won't have any other choice but to get into great shape..

Cross Country is seen as a solitary sport, and it is to an extent, but it's also built around the relationships you develop with your teammates. If you run alone, and if you run with others, you'll notice a huge difference. If you're trying to keep up with the team, you'll have to push yourself. You won't give up and start walking because you think you're tired. You don't know what tired is. :p You'll keep running to stay with the pack, and if they're good, they'll cheer you on. They won't slow down for you, but they'll yell at you to hurry and catch up, quit slacking, don't walk! It's very much a team sport. Your teammates keep you going; they keep you running.

If you run hard, always push yourself just a bit farther, you'll be able to take what you gained from cross country - no matter how many years you stick with it - and apply it anwhere.

Besides, what's more important in the long run? The temporary popularity you'll achieve if you manage to make the football team, and you manage to become the star quarterback, or the boost in physical fitness, confidence, and psychological strength that comes with cross country?

Unless you've done both, no one is really in any kind of position to to say which sport builds better comraderie.