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    On the other side of things, one Wayzata coach says he never tells the kids the distance before they join. He gets them hooked on the sport regardless of the distance. His argument is he coaches the biggest school in Minnesota, so he has lots of opportunities to find and recruit more runners to his team. Whereas, a single a school usually doesn’t have a whole lot to work with. Not nearly as much as a huge school like Wayzata (What's the Right Distance for Girls' Cross-country?).     Minnesota isn’t the only school that doesn’t run a 5K in the United States. There are quite a few more. A couple of the states that continuously produce good runners, even though they don’t run a 5K, are Wisconsin, North Dakota, and Texas. Wisconsin produced the best runner in the United States last year for girls. Molly Seidel easily won her state meet in Wisconsin. She went on to win the regional and National Footlocker meets. She was then named Gatorades National Runner of the Year. Her state win was a 4K, but all of the rest of the races she ran at the National level were 5K’s. It shows that running the farther distance all year long doesn’t necessarily make you better. Hard work and talent can make you succeed at any distant.      Another argument on changing it to a 5K is gender equity. They say girls can do just as much as boys and should be allowed to prove themselves and compete at the same level of boys. Some people argue that keeping the girls at a 4K is a Title Nine issue. Some conferences actually run a 5K for both girls and boys at their conference meets even though they’re in a state that is still a 4K state for girls. Gender has caused a major role in the transformation from girls running a 4K to a 5K. Most people in this day and age believe that Women should be tested at the same standards in everything including athletic events (Christopher Parish).      Changing girls 4K to a 5K would make meet management a lot easier as well. Having both the boys and girls running the same race will make everything easier. You would only have to make a course for a 5K race, instead of both a 4K and a 5K. Even though managing it would be easier it would take a lot more time. Lots of the slower girls that run a 4K now finish the race right around twenty-five and twenty-six minutes. If you add another half a mile on that, some girls won’t be able to handle it, or will still be racing after thirty minutes. This makes everything go by slower, especially when you potentially have four races that could all be 5K’s in a single meet. The four races would include races for boys Varsity, girls Varsity, boys Junior Varsity, and girls Junior Varsity. The Junior Varsity races for girls could get extremely slow and could make the meets a lot longer than what they are when girls run just a 4K.      The increase from a 4K to 5K really isn’t that much of an increase in distance. It is only a twenty percent. Girls are strong. They can handle a half of a mile more in a race. This isn’t the 80’s anymore where people think girls can’t do anything as athletic as males. Girls have developed and have become a major part of sports. Girls can handle the increase. They handled it in the 80’s so they can handle it now, especially with all the new equipment they have to make training and racing that much easier for you (Wisconsin HS Girls: 4k or 5k?).