Tre,
Why didn't you ever pursue Olympic glory?
I'm serious. If your times are legit, there is absolutely no way you didn't have scouts from all sports and events banging your door down.
I went to school with a guy who was 3rd in the country in the 400m and 6th in the 200m. He was also top 3 in the state in the 100m, so he was fast for all "sprint" distances.
He had offers from just about every university in the nation for track....but he had offers from colleges for sports HE DIDN'T EVEN PLAY based on his speed.
He had offers from just about every big football program in the nation, and he hadn't played football since 10th grade!
The reason he stopped playing football was because after putting up a top 10 time in the 400m in 10th grade, he became an "Olympic Hopeful" and started spending his summers at Olympic Training Centers...first at Chula Vista (which was brand new) and then at Colorado Springs.
THAT is what happens to guys who run 4.4 40's in high school....they become Olympic hopefuls.
Your intuition says that, but you'd be surprised at the number of guys who've run sub-23s in the 200 or ~48s in the 400 that you've never heard of. These are really fast times, but 6/10ths of a second difference in the 200 translates to you looking like you got blown out. A 1-second difference in the 400, and you're 10 meters behind the 3rd-place finisher. And in the 100m, 11.2s is faster than 98.8% of the world, but 10.8s is faster than probably 99.8% of the world. Despite what the numbers look like on paper, these are massive differences.
Also, most people don't understand how college recruiting works, especially when we're talking about 2A high schools. When combined with cross country, a FULLY-funded running program only had about 12 scholarships for men and since both of my college choices already had 5-6 cross-country runners on full scholarship, that left 6 for the entire track team. That's not 6 for an entering class, that's 6 that have to be divided among the entire team. Colleges just aren't sending scouts out to watch the #3 or 4 guy at a regional meet for the small schools, even though our times were often quite competitive with the 3A and 4A schools.
Many high schools themselves are also involved in promoting and positioning athletes to be compete for athletic scholarships, but I didn't attend that type of high school. Graduating classes from my high school do, however, rank among the top in the country each year in terms of ACADEMIC scholarship dollars won per person.
I know that many Americans want to believe that pure, raw talent always wins out, but luck and timing play huge roles (in determining who gets recruited and for what) and at the level of competition we're talking, tiny differences on the clock are magnified on the track.
