Pound for pound, you might say, high school track has always had a bigger fan base in the United States than professional track. Sure, the big boys (and girls) are the center of attention once every four years, and get a good amount on two of the remaining three years because of the World Championships, but high school track, by sheer dint of numbers, has always been bigger.

Perhaps I am just being obvious in an irritating way. Of course, high school track has more participants -- much more -- than the NCAA or the post-collegiate circuits. That's the nature of the athletic food chain. And all those high school numbers means legions of moms and dads sitting in the stands. And if you're cynical enough, you might add that the vast majority of those fans are there just to watch their own kids, and that doesn't count.

But yet the same rationale doesn't hold true for baseball, where I suspect the pros and the minor leagues draw more fans than the local school teams. Football I suspect is much closer, as Friday night prep games are a tradition for many, even if they don't have kids playing.

Yet in track, all this is changing. As a fan phenomenon, it is getting bigger. I can't quantify this, but I can see it quite clearly in anecdotal terms. Twenty-five years ago, devoted prep track fans (out there to watch more than their own kids), had little access to information. They saw the local meets, traveled to their state meets, and if they lived close enough, perhaps they made the trip to one of the big postseason events: Sacramento's Golden West Invitational or the Chicago area's International Prep Invitational (now defunct).

Those meets drew scant national attention, so the distant fan had to wait weeks for Track and Field News to report the results. The same with any major prep national accomplishments back then. We wouldn't find out about national indoor records being broken until halfway through the outdoor season.

The lack of a quick information flow limited the number of fans who followed prep track nationally, a concept that is simple to prove by looking at the way things are now. Track and Field News delivers its results quickly over the Internet via its "eTN" publication. The Dyestat website provides in-depth national coverage, and a host of other people and organizations -- linked by the Internet -- make sure the best athletes from all over the country get the notice they deserve as they are emerging.

All that information flow makes it far easier for the major postseason meets to pull together incredible fields. Quality has improved dramatically. A few years ago, a 4:07 mile would have gotten a kid accolades as the "next Jim Ryun." At this year's adidas Outdoor Championships (AOC), it didn't even get a kid the sixth-place medal.

"Mind-boggling," says Jim Spier, one of the organizers of the event. "Many years this would have been good enough to win."

Jack Shepard, longtime prep editor for T&FN, attributes the rise in performances to the Internet.

"A decade or more ago, each elite athlete performed in somewhat of a vacuum and only knew about other top performers from their own region. There was only a short list of top performers in T&FN, and that was just once a month. Now," he says, "with the Internet and web sites like Dyestat, athletes converse (almost daily) with each other, check long lists of other performers in their event, and plan the nationwide trips to compete against each other.

"This leads to great fields in certain events. ... The greatest eight-lap race in prep history (Arcadia Invitational, this spring) and possibly the greatest prep mile race ever (this year's AOC), don't just happen. Obviously, part of it is aggressive promoting by meet management, but more importantly is the fact that the kids talk to each other and all agree to attend one or another meet to run against each other."

Mike Byrnes, one of the directors of the AOC, agrees: "The Internet has helped a great deal. The good kids connect and compare notes, afford tips on training, comment on workouts, etc. For example, the pole vault at the AOC meet was quite weak due to the elite vaulters comparing notes and commenting the runway at NC State wasn't very good, thus, virtually all the quality vaulters went to the Golden West where the facility is better (Oregon's Tommy Skipper won in a national record)."

There are other ways the flow of information has helped improve quality indirectly. Says Byrnes, "Kids from lesser trackwise areas get a look at an athlete like Tommy Skipper or a relay team like New Jersey's Wilson. People go away from the track with a heightened awareness as to just how good our sport is."

John Dye, who runs the DyeStat website, a venture that started out as a means for him to better follow the national progress of his pole vaulter daughter but now calls itself the "Internet home of high school track," calls recent seasons a "resurgence" of high school track.

"Kids and coaches now know almost instantly what other kids are doing around the country," says Die. "Instead of just being king of the valley (county, conference, state), kids are motivated to do better because they see someone else is doing it."

Naturally, the boom of the Internet paves the way to comparisons with the print media, and what an inherently poor job the newspapers have done with covering track over the years.

Says Dye, "One of the types of feedback I get a lot is that track gets second-class treatment at home in their school programs and in local newspapers. Some of them say they get more publicity on DyeStat than they get in their hometown papers, which give all their play to football and basketball."

Yet as quality rises and fans increase, not all can be attributed to our society's electronic advances. Much of it has to do with old-fashioned hard work on the part of athletes and coaches. And the aggressive promoting of postseason meets likewise shows a strong link to elbow grease.

Byrnes says that the AOC's A.J. Holzherr works at the job of recruitment on an "almost full-time" basis. The Golden West meet has also worked hard to be more competitive, transforming itself from a meet restricted only to 12th-grade boys to one that welcomes any top high school boy or girl.

The situation is not rosy everywhere. Shepard notes that while many state events are reporting sell-out crowds, attendance at the fabled California state meet has actually been dropping. "There are just too many other activities to draw you away from a track meet."

Still, the world or prep track and field looks far different now than it did a few decades ago. And while professional track has also been transformed, that has more to do with the financial changes in the sport than with information delivery. In fact, it can be argued that big-time track, while it has benefitted from the Internet, has not seen anywhere near the growth that the prep sector has enjoyed.

Is it all for the better? Assuredly, though you might have a hard time convincing the kid who ran 4:07 and didn't win a medal.

Jeff Hollobaugh, former managing editor of Track and Field News, is a regular contributor to ESPN.com. He can be reached by e-mail at michtrack@aol.com.