Florida’s High Schools Will Jump and Throw, as Well as Run, in Meters
It seems highly unlikely that the 121.92-meter home run would gain any more traction now than it did during baseball’s flirtation with metric distances on outfield fences in the 1970s. And a television audience might be more confused than delirious if it was announced that Stephen Curry had just hit a buzzer-beater from 10.67 meters instead of 35 feet.
The hoariest of clichés also appear safe, too. Football is in no danger of becoming a game of centimeters.
But track and field long ago loosened its ties to the feet and inches of the British imperial system, and among track events, only the seldom-run mile persists as a revered imperial distance.
Yet within American track and field there are conflicting views about how pervasive the metric system should become. One side calls the imperial system antiquated and says it should be abandoned in favor of international uniformity. The other side says familiarity is needed to preserve history and maintain relevance for a sport that is robust in participation but struggles for spectator interest outside of the Olympics.
The latest organization to enter the debate is the Florida High School Athletic Association. As the outdoor track season opens in February, Florida high schools will apparently become the first in the country to measure field events using the metric system, as they have done for all track events since 1990, introducing it for all district, regional and state track and field championships.
Metric measurements for the throwing and jumping events are being encouraged for regular-season meets this year. That means a 15-foot pole vault will be recorded as 4.57 meters. A shot-put throw of 55 feet 8 ½ inches will be measured and announced as 16.98 meters. Long jumpers and javelin throwers, among others, will face a similarly new world in which, supporters argue, there will be more accurate measurements and, thus, few ties.
The metric system will become mandatory for field events at all Florida high school meets beginning in 2018. Proponents say this will simply bring the state in line with the rest of the track world. The Olympics and other international competitions at the junior and senior levels measure jumping and throwing events using the metric system. So do collegiate and professional meets in the United States.
“I personally feel like we have the best track and field in the country, arguably the best,” said Ed Thompson, a director of athletics and chief administrator for track and field at the Florida high school association. “In light of that, it should be our position to lead. I take a lot of pride in breaking new ground and doing things that improve our sport.”
It is far too early to know whether this represents the beginning of the end of the imperial system in high school track and field, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. But states do tend to follow one another, said Dan Dearing, the track coach at the Bolles School in Jacksonville, Fla., and chairman of the state’s track coaches association.
“I hope that 20 years from now, maybe Florida will be given credit for being the first one that ushered in an era of change to try to unify the sport of track and field,” Dearing said.
Not everyone is convinced this change will be beneficial. The popular website letsrun.com called Florida’s decision “proof positive that there are way too many administrators out there.” It carried the news under a snarky message-board headline, “Let’s make track even more unpopular.”
And a grass-roots campaign called Bring Back the Mile has found resonance among many college coaches. There is even a suggestion that metric distances be scrapped at the professional level in favor of a return to the imperial 100-yard dash, the 220, 440 and 880, and so on. One upside, supporters say, is that a return to the old distances would have the effect of resetting the record book, whose legitimacy has been questioned because of widespread doping.
“It all stems from the attempt to reconfigure what seems to be a broken game,” said Toni Reavis, a prominent American commentator who has proposed a return to the imperial system.
Ken Brauman, an influential track coach at Seminole High in Sanford, Fla., who served as team manager for USA Track and Field at the 2012 London Olympics, said he had no issue with the metric system. But he expressed concern about bewildering American spectators.
“If they announce that a long jump is an 8-meter jump, people in the stands don’t understand that” it is a jump of 26 feet 3 inches, Brauman said.
If results were reported both metrically and in feet and inches “to where the fans understand it better, I don’t see any problem with it,” he added.
Thompson, the chief track official with the Florida high school association, said that results would be published both in meters and in feet and inches. He also said he was “leaning toward” having heights and distances announced both ways at the state meet, to avoid “negative feedback.” This is regularly done at N.C.A.A. meets and at competitions like the United States Olympic trials.
“I expect it to work well,” Thompson said of metric measurements. “If it doesn’t, I think this office and the folks who are influential in the sport in our state have enough humility to say, ‘It didn’t work, so we’ll just go back to what we were doing before.’”
While the metric system has largely prevailed in track and field, the Bring Back the Mile campaign argues that no event in the sport carries the same mystique and appeal of history.
Fans of the elemental beauty of the 100 meters might disagree. Still, the four-minute mile continues to resonate in the United States as a measure of speed and endurance more than a half century after Roger Bannister of Britain broke the mark in 1954 and Jim Ryun did it as an American high schooler in 1964. The mile run also remains a gauge of fitness understood by everyone who has taken a phys ed class.
Yet the mile is run now only at select meets. It has been supplanted by the metric mile, or 1,500 meters, at the college and pro levels. American high schoolers mostly run the 1,600 meters, a distance whose chief recommendation is the bureaucratic convenience of being four laps around a track.
Ryan Lamppa, a researcher and record keeper, is trying to change that. He founded the Bring Back the Mile campaign in 2012 and calls the mile “America’s distance.”
“There’s not an American boy who has dreamed of breaking four minutes for the 1,600,” Lamppa said. In that event, he said, “There’s never going to be that Roger Bannister moment, or that Jim Ryun moment at the high school level, of breaking four minutes for an understood and relatable distance, like the mile.”
In 2015, college coaches voted 221 to 169 to restore the mile at the N.C.A.A. outdoor championships. The change still awaits final approval, but Sheila Reid, a former N.C.A.A. champion at Villanova, has noted that the event holds little historical significance for female runners.
“This isn’t marketability,” Reid wrote on her Twitter account in 2015, “it’s male nostalgia.”
Still, Lamppa believes the metric system will not be fully embraced by the American sporting culture until the unlikely time when the gold standard in football becomes the 914.4-meter rusher.
“If football goes metric,” Lamppa said, “that’s when we know that the English system has been purged from America.”
P.C: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/sports/floridas-high-schools-field-events-metric.html
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