Runners head down the nearly half-mile hill at the Crystal Springs Cross Country Course to start the 2009 PAL championships. CSM, which is ending its control of the course, said it will continue to run the facility until the end of the year.
While some may have been blindsided when College of San Mateo made the decision to close the Crystal Springs Cross Country Course, which the school has maintained since its opening in 1971, Terry Stogner, Peninsula Athletic League commissioner, was not one of those caught off guard by the news.
“This has been coming for a while,” Stogner said, adding there has been talk the last couple years about CSM walking away from the course.
“They’ve been telling us.”
In a press release Friday, CSM said the school barely uses the facility any more and it was no longer willing to assume the liability risks of course use. CSM athletic director Andreas Wolf said the cross country team trains on and around campus and the Crystal Springs facility is used by the school, at the most, once every other year as the host course for the Coast Conference championships.
“The college cannot take responsibility for a site that is no longer part of our core operations,” the press release said. “Our goal is to facilitate a transition to another organization by the end of 2020. Until then, cross country events and community access will continue uninterrupted (subject to local shelter-in-place restrictions).”
CSM spokesperson Rich Rojo said everything will stay the same until the end of the calendar year, meaning the regular-season and postseason high school cross country meets will go on as planned as everyone works on finding an entity to take over the facilities.
“It operates as normal until the end of 2020,” Rojo said, refuting the claim that the course was closed for good. “We would like to get through fall 2020, operating normally and then re-evaluating.”
All of this is contingent on the status of the coronavirus pandemic.
The course is used by the PAL for two events each season — the final regular-season league meet and the league championships — but is also used as a training site for many schools. The course in Half Moon Bay is home to one of three league meets and last season the PAL used the Baylands course in Menlo Park and the league will be looking to incorporate the Westmoor High course back into the rotation, as well.
The first hurdle is trying to find an organization willing to take over the use permit from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and manage the course. If and when that happens, that is only the first step. The next is trying to find a way to placate the Belmont neighborhood that surrounds the course because, with many leagues from the Central Coast Section using the facility for their league championships, the place can get quite busy during the postseason.
“There are a million cross country meets (there). That neighborhood is not thrilled,” Stogner said. “We pay the expenses to have police up there for league meets. You have people not always following the rules.”
There could also come a time when the course limits its use to others outside the community.
“We’re trying to find a way to keep this thing rolling. … It may not be the same as before. It might not be used by other leagues. Whoever winds up in charge of it will control that,” Stogner said. “We’re trying to find someone who can take a permit with SFPUC. Then we need an organization to run it, to schedule it, to maintain it, to collect the fees.
“Bob Rush (who helped design and build the course) did a fantastic job of keeping that place up and running.”
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(2) comments
This is a world class cross country course, and it should remain open for all California high school students and middle school students to compete on. Kudos to Bob Rush for building it and maintaining it for the past 50 years. Signed, homeowner Belmont Heights
The post from Belmont Heights (above) is not representative of the opinions of the neighborhood association nor residents. Nor, I suspect, does it represent the opinions of the SFPUC which owns the land. The preserve is the watershed to our drinking water and the mission of the water district is to preserve, not exploit the land. I agree the course can and should be managed as a resource for local youth and residents but at a much lower intensity than Rush was promoting, out of respect for local impacts.
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