Birmingham Group Loses Annual Meet : Track and field: Sponsor’s lack of manpower cited for National Scholastic Outdoor Championships’ move to N.C. State.

The postseason national high school track and field schedule, which used to include an important meet staged at Birmingham High, has undergone several changes.

The National Scholastic Outdoor Championships, which had been held at Birmingham the past three years, has been moved to North Carolina State. In addition, the Golden West Invitational in Sacramento has a new format and the International Prep Invitational, run in suburban Chicago, has been canceled.

“There have been a lot of changes this year and not all of them are good,” said Doug Speck, one of the promoters of the prestigious Arcadia Invitational. “Losing a meet such as the (International Prep) is not a good sign for the sport.”

The National Scholastic Outdoor meet will be held June 19, a week later than in the past. The meet was sponsored by the Birmingham High Dad’s Club for the first three years of its existence. However, the National Scholastic Sports Foundation in Chapel Hill, N.C., chose not to renew its contract with that group this year because of the way the meet was run.

“They didn’t have enough people to do the job the way it should have been done,” said Mike Byrnes, NSSF president. “The scope and magnitude of the meet was just too overwhelming for the people involved.”

Byrnes criticized Lou Ramirez, the meet director and Birmingham’s athletic director, for his insistence on being in charge of every aspect of the event. Ramirez refused to delegate authority, which led to disorganization at times, according to Byrnes.

“If they had done what they were supposed to do, raise money for the meet, and let us do what we were supposed to do, run the meet, it would have been a perfect marriage,” Byrnes said.

Ramirez conceded “we had too few people needed to run the meet,” which last year was held at Birmingham and UCLA. He declined to respond to other criticisms, saying, “anything else would only hurt the sport and I don’t want to do that.

This year’s meet was scheduled to be held at Georgia Tech in Atlanta but, because of the cost of staging a meet there, was moved to Raleigh, N.C., over the weekend. Still, Byrnes wishes the meet could have stayed in Southern California.

“It’s too bad things didn’t work out with (the Birmingham High Dad’s Club),” he said. “The meet has become a major fixture and you have to credit them with that. But there were too many other problems.”

The Golden West Invitational, which began as a boys’ competition in 1960 and added a girls’ meet in 1988, will be held in Sacramento on June 11. Meet organizers dropped the seniors-only format this year to try to improve the quality of the fields.

“Our goal has always been to have the top eight competitors in the country compete in each event,” meet director John Mansoor said. “But we weren’t reaching that goal in recent years, especially in the girls’ meet where a lot of the top athletes are juniors or even sophomores.”

The failure to draw top athletes also was linked to a scheduling conflict with the National Scholastic Outdoor Championships. Those two meets had been run on the same weekend because neither wanted to compete against the International Prep meet. That meet--also known as the Keebler Invitational--was canceled because of financial reasons after the Keebler Cookie Co. was purchased by a British conglomerate last year.

This year, the Golden West and National Scholastic meets will be held on successive weekends.

“No (meet organizer) wanted to compete with the (International Prep) meet,” Byrnes said. “They just had too much money . . . but now that they’re gone, it’s a good weekend for us.”

The International Prep meet, which was held in Elmhurst, Ill., traditionally featured some of the top athletes in the United States, as well as in Canada and the Caribbean islands.

It was the envy of Golden West and National Scholastic organizers because it had a huge budget, estimated to be as much as $250,000.