Where do you currently go to get all your track and field results? If you are motivated enough, you find the results link to a specific track meet; if you can find it, you look through it for a couple of minutes until you forget about the link. If you’re a fan of any other major sport, it can easily be found on an app, from different teams’ pages, or the official league pages; you might even stumble upon the results without actively seeking them out. What’s even more available are highlights from certain games that capture the attention of casual fans, which, outside of the NCAA, is hard to come by in a timely and widely spread fashion, but that’s a topic for another day.

Today, I want to discuss how difficult it is for track fans to access results for various track and field meets across the world on a weekly basis. We do have some saviors, whom I like to call volunteer contributors, who put in hours of work to gather all the best results from across the internet and bring them to one place. These are the unsung heroes in the sport who do the work that the governing bodies, meet directors, and others who are actually getting paid should be doing. And why do they do it? Simply for the love of the sport. In a perfect world, they would be financially compensated for their efforts, but for now, I hope recognizing their immense impact on the sport will suffice.

There was one Twitter user who was extremely popular among fans and athletes for providing quick updates and highlighting star performances but fell out of favor after questioning the legitimacy of the women’s 100m hurdles world record… still odd, but since then, new faces have emerged, helping to push the sport to new corners of the internet with their swift fingers on Twitter. A few of them are @trackgazette, @kemal_e_forde, @kadeembarrett11, @owenM, @rainnie_q, to name a few. I also want to give an honorable mention to @travismillerx13, who, even though he provides just as much coverage as the list I mentioned, is employed with NBC Sports, so it’s in line with his job to promote the sport through his tweets. Travis was at FloTrack before working for NBC, which makes him a well-qualified veteran in the Track & Field communication game.

We’ve identified the problem; now, what’s the solution? It’s a two-part suggestion for me. These contributors are already doing a great job; their time and effort deserve to be compensated by meets that would like their track meets to have better coverage. The other suggestion is that World Athletics, the organization that governs track and field worldwide, provide these results (and highlights) by hiring in-house professionals (keeping in mind that these same contributors I mentioned would be qualified) to consistently update fans on the results happening across the world. I would love to hear your thoughts on possible solutions to this serious problem.