t-and-f: Junior qualifying

[Ed Grant]

Netters:         Since I started this discussion over the qualifying for the world youth team, maybe I should clarify exactly what my position is:         1) Qualification should be, when possible, from meet(s) held the same year as the competition. (A world yotuh meet in the Antipodes could be early the following year, in which case we probably wouldn't have much of an entry no matter how we qualify our athletes.           2) Whatever meet(s) are used, something has to be done about the abysmal failure (and not just for junior meets) of too many local USATF unioits to properly emply the local media to get the word around.        3) It is obvious that in some areas, the AAU JO meet remains more popular than the one sponsored by the USATF. That issue could have been solved long ago by a simple use of logic. No one-sport organization has any justification to use the term "Olympics," which is, by definition a multi-sport competition.         In the best of worlds, the USOC would run the Junior Olympic program as it does the US Olympic team itself--farming out the qualifying to designated organizations such as USATF. Since it evidently doesn't want to do this---it has had 20 years to pick up the ball---then the only multi-sport organization around to do this would be the AAU.         In either case, the USATF could run its JO qualifying meet, send these athletes to a multi-sport competition and, at the same time, send those qho qualify to the World Youth Games. There would then, perhaps, be an end to the redundancy of two junior competitions run each summer by USATF. Or would that be too simple a solution?           Perhaps we ought to look into how other nations do it.                                                                     Ed Grant