By Stephen “SteveU” Underwood

November 2, 2012: the country’s attention is on the aftermath of a deadly, historic storm and a Presidential election. Meanwhile, the cross country nation is in the midst of another exciting state meet season and the NXN and Foot Locker championships are just around the corner.

Unfortunately, this is also the day we’re saying our final goodbyes to DyeStat.com, and our recently formed DyeTrack.com; what has remained of our efforts since ESPN pulled the plug. Our founder,John Dye, is ready to finally move on after months of trying to find ways to keep DyeStat going and what remains of our staff, including myself, have reluctantly agreed.

It’s a sad day, an ending to something that was once great, and was diminished greatly for several reasons – but was still running a final lap on heart. I want to say more about the end, but before I do that, I can’t help but look back to how it all began for me, how I was able to discover something exciting that I could relate to immensely, then something that had been created to ride the crest of this wave, and how I was gratefully able to get on that ride for more than a dozen years.

I don’t want this goodbye to be all about me or the opportunity John gave me, because without you – the athletes, families, fans, coaches, meet directors, photographers, contributors, national governing bodies, all in these great sports of prep track and field, and cross country – there couldn’t have been any DyeStat. But it’s a story I need to tell again.

It was 1999, and our sports, as they existed on the internet, were still in their early developmental stages. As a lifelong track nut, I had learned in the mid-late 90s to navigate the sites that had national, international, and collegiate news, results, etc. (remember tnfmedia.com, and the early days of doitsports.com?). That was my main area of interest as a fan and former runner.

But my interest in keeping up with high school news and results was picking up a little, thanks in large part to a national prep track and XC site I discovered that year called DyeStat.com. I had also found Jeff Hollobaugh’s Michigan prep site, michtrack.org, and between them, I began noting with great interests performances coming out of Rockford, Michigan, among other places. I was living in Atlanta at the time, but I had grown up and had most of my own running career in Michigan (East Lansing H.S., Class of ’80). I knew the latter part of the 80s and much of the 90s had been kind of lackluster for high school distance performances, both nationally and in Michigan. But here were these kids from Rockford running some amazing times, and I recall one spring morning getting online and seeing that two kids named Jason Hartmann and Dathan Ritzenhein from that school had run 9:01.6 and 9:07.8 for 3,200 meters in dual meets.

And this Ritzenhein kid, he was just a sophomore!

My DyeStat addiction was beginning.

Not long after, I joined the DyeStat message boards, going by “SteveU” for the first time. I was working in the offices of a publishing company at the time, as the editor of a sporting goods business magazine. That spring and fall, I remember following the results of Ritzenhein and a few other great preps from that day (Alan Webb, Ryan Hall, you may have heard of them) as they set the distance community on fire. I remember the thrill of following on DyeStat in December the 1999 Foot Locker Finals from Orlando, as Ritz won the first of his two titles. It seemed like what was going on with these athletes was more exciting to me than anything else going on at the different levels of the sport, and I was hooked.

As winter turned into spring and the “Big Three” and other athletes took aim at performances that just a few years ago had seemed unreachable, I found myself yearning to somehow be a part of it. I sure as heck wasn’t going to be running any 9-minute, 2-miles myself, but maybe I could tell the stories of those who were.

So, in May, 2000, I wrote John Dye, the founder of this DyeStat.com, and asked him if I could write some profiles of these great young distance runners – not just the Big Three, but also others developing sparkling resumes, like Matt Tegenkamp and Don Sage, and outstanding girls like Sara Bei and Shalane Flanagan. I had discovered another web site that kind of helped me quantify what myself and many others saw happening. This site was the creation of Patrick Hoffman, a doctoral student who moonlighted as a track stats analyst (now assistant professor at Benjamin Franklin Tech in Boston), and it included lists of all-time performances in the distances by high school boys. He called the kids on the 2-mile list “Distance Gods” – due to the flood of admiration for legends likeSteve Prefontaine, Craig Virgin, Gerry Lindgren and Jeff Nelson. Their performances, mostly from the 60s and 70s, had seemed unattainable. But suddenly there were kids who could run sub-8:50 again.

So why not write a series about the return to glory of prep distance … “The Distance Gods are Back!”

John thought it was a good idea and I cranked out a slew of features during the weeks leading up to (what was then) Foot Locker Outdoor Nationals (my only regret is I could never snag Webb for an interview). Then I went to Raleigh and watched most of the kids race. A dozen years of contributions to DyeStat had begun.

For the first five years, it was occasional coverage of national track and XC championships, a few regional championships and invitationals, some book reviews, and eventually monitoring the unwieldy monster of a message board that became a nearly all-consuming obsession – especially, when mischief arose, often in the form of internet memes that would burn holes in your eyeballs before they could mercifully be deleted (some of you know the ones).

In 2004, Rudy Chapa, Andy Bark and Student Sports purchased DyeStat.com, but John Dye still remained in editorial control. The difference was we now had something of a budget. That fall, the first Nike Team Nationals were held in Portland and I was part of a massive coverage team that included some wonderful regional editors. Finally, in September, 2005, my dream of serving DyeStat on a full-time basis, as a “senior editor” and “news editor” was realized.

With a gang of Track Talk posters and other DyeStatters at the 2006 Foot Locker Midwest in Kenosha.

The past seven years I’ve been one of those folks who can say they’ve had their “dream job.” Working with John, under Rudy and Trish Chapa and Student Sports, and with all the staff we’ve had over the years, was the greatest. It’s been hard work and long hours, but what a joy to chronicle the achievements of all of these great student-athletes, many of whom have gone on to be collegiate and Olympic standouts. And what a privilege to become part of this amazing community – from the grizzled media veterans of the sport to the families of the young athletes discovering the sport for the first time, and everyone in between.

When ESPN purchased DyeStat in 2008, we were all understandably thrilled, having thought we’d really, truly “made it” and that things would only get bigger and better. Of course, it was much more complex than our immediate ideals and, to become part ESPN’s high school sports package required changes and adjustments.

Much of what would transpire is painful to recount and anyone who’s followed us awhile knows most of the story. In the end, it not only didn’t work for us, but it didn’t work at all, as evidenced by the termination of ESPN High School in June.

We hoped to find a way to continue, but could not.

So now is the time to acknowledge all of those who made DyeStat work wonderful for me. I’ll begin with the staff and take it from the top:

This man, John Dye, who discovered the sport about six decades into his life, through the achievements of his kids, is an amazing story. When he first popped up at national meets, I think the old guard was a little reluctant to accept him, but for what he brought to our sports and those involved at every level, he was eventually embraced by all for this unique creation of DyeStat. The day he accepted my first stories in 2000 was a turning point for me, personally and professionally. I’m so grateful to have had the assignments and message board admin opportunity in those early years, and the career opportunity later. I could go on and on, but I’ll end it on this: John brought his old-school journalism sensibilities to DyeStat and meshed them with an impressive grasp of what was required to be relevant on the internet. And to be relevant online with something like DyeStat into your 70s is no mean feat.

With John Dye and John Nepolitan at The Armory.

Then there was our Grand Dame, the queen of DyeStat, the ultimate Track Mom of all time – Donna Dye. Her Donna-on-the-Side photo features were as wonderful as anything the site ever produced and eagerly awaited by thousands of athletes and families at meets from shore to shore. And her College Choices signing/photo features, along with advice to aspiring collegiate athletes, were another great staple of the site.

And DyeStat would never have happened without Derek and Natalie Dye, whose Maryland state championship exploits inspired John to create first a local newsletter, then a state-wide newsletter, and finally a state and then national web site. Additional gratitude is owed Derek, whose technical expertise has done so much for the site for its entire history, with the crowning achievement of creating our TFX system, which has ranked hundreds of thousands of athletes with millions of performances.

Thank you, John, Donna, Derek and Natalie.

In the early days, from the Portland area, there was Marc Davis – the former Foot Locker champ and world class distance runner who served as editor and videographer, and Justina Jassen, a rising, young multi-talented professional.

Also from Portland came an extremely talented writer named Dave Devine. Dave would eventually become a senior editor and managing editor, and I liked to call him the ultimate 5-tool player (to use a baseball term), because Dave – who departed for a university position in 2011 – did everything well: writing, editing, page creation and design, had general internet and computer savvy, and knew the sport as well as anyone.

And from Dave’s connections came his successor, Doug Binder, yet another from the PDX. Doug, too, was a tracknut deep in the Portland/Eugene culture and, above all, a crack deadline scribe. He was an outstanding editor to work with, in his own way. I couldn’t have asked for better guys to work with. Thank you, all.

Then there’s our national photographers and videographers, beginning with our incomparable shooterJohn Nepolitan from New York. I traveled with the “Track Junkie,” working around the country and to Canada and France, too. There’s no one who I’d rather have had my back. We got a lot of help from international professionals like Vic Sailer and Kirby Lee, as well as those who contributed locally or on the road with us, like Walter Pinion, Pat Davey, Robert Rosenberg, Andy Kiyokawa, Bert Richardson, Stuart Kantor, Gregg Armstrong, Gary Paulson, Jim Kirby, and many, many more.

Kudos, too, to our most recent video editor Moses Galindo (who with Nicole Haynes and Rich Gonzalez also formed our DyeCast crew out in California). There were our California and Illinois editors: In the Golden State, there was the inimitable Rich Gonzalez, the wonderful late Doug Speck, and his peer in stats and all else in the sport, Mike Kennedy. In Illinois, we had Bob Geigerand Tony Jones from Illinois Prep Top Times, and later Mike Newman (who also did a fantastic job with our database). Thanks to all of you.

Editorially, we had fantastic contributions from the likes of internationally renowned Marc Bloom, super statman and ranker Rob “Watchout” Monroe (who we found on the message boards), Penn Relays guru and Eastern Track publisher Walt Murphy, High School Track editor Jack Shepard, and so many others who contributed editorially. We had a lot of support and comradeship from the likes ofJim Spier, Joy Kamani, Paul Limmer, AJ Holzherr and others at the NSAF, and others from the various organizations in the sport.

There were others who would do anything and everything to help us out: Matt Sayre on the technical and IT level in Portland, our do-everything superstar Kirsten Leetch in Torrance. Calif. from our original Student Sports team, and numerous others.

At the next level – coaches, parents, athletes, Track Talk posters, fans, statisticians, other professionals in the sport – there are so many more. There’s no way I could thank or acknowledge everyone, but you know who you are. Thanks to all of you for making DyeStat possible and relevant for so many years, and for helping an aspiring track journalist’s dreams come true.