Cross Country 101

A primer on Cross Country for those new to the sport

(Written in 2012 - A brief intro to XC - by Coach Lawrence)

It was recently brought to my attention that several parents read this blog. Hello parents! While I have generally assumed my reading audience was well-versed in our sport’s vocabulary and history, I now realize that is not necessarily true. Therefore, I would like to graciously accept a suggestion by one of our athletes' mothers to explain some basic Cross Country concepts, as well as to dispel a few myths and misconceptions about competitive distance running.

Let’s first start with how meets are scored. In the simplest terms, you take the final place of your top 5 finishers, add up the total, and the team with the lowest score wins. However, it gets a bit more complicated, depending on the type of meet we are running. Let’s examine three different cases:

THURDSAY DUAL/TRI MEETS-These competitions are specific to the West Suburban Conference Silver Division. Since the days when I ran for York, or even since Coach Westhphal ran for OPRF, our conference has always used Thursdays for duals. The dual meet is a lower-key meet where teams square off against one another. What may look like a three team meet is, in effect, three different matches. Thus, when we competed against York and LT this past Thursday, this was really three different competitions in one: HC v. LT, LT v. York, York v. HC. When scoring HC v. LT, all York runners are not counted in the scoring, and you look only at HC and LT runners. Billy Magnesen finished 11th in the meet, but only 2 LT runners beat him. Thus, LT scored 1 and 2 (for having their first 2 runners in front of our first) and Billy would get a score of 3.

The best a team can do in a dual meet is to win 15-50. To do this, the team would have to sweep the top 7 positions. They would get 15 points (1-2-3-4-5) and their 6th and 7th finishers would displace the other team, who would then score (8-9-10-11-12) for 50. Note that even if the losing team’s best finisher was beaten by 15 runners from the other team, they’d still get a score of 8. Thus, referring back to Magnesen in the dual meet, he was 11th overall, but scored an 8 for the team scoring.

INVITATIONALS-These are probably the most straightforward. Again, your score is determined by adding up the finishing place of your fastest 5 runners. A team’s 6th and 7th runners don’t count towards their score, but can be helpful in that they can push up scores of your opponents. For many early-season invites, we are allowed unlimited entries. However, any athlete not in our top 7 is not counted for the purposes of scoring. For example, if HC puts 7 runners in the top 20 of a meet, and team X’s 4th runner places 21st, then that team would get 21 points for their 4th runner. But if our 8th and 9th best finishers placed 22nd and 23rd overall, while team X’s 5th runner placed 24th, then team X would get 22 points for their 5th runner, since our 8 and 9 guys don’t count.

SECTIONALS AND STATE-These meets are a bit unusual in that there are some athletes who have qualified as individuals rather than representing a team. A very talented runner who competes for a lackluster team may earn a trip down to state if he/she runs well in Regionals and Sectionals. However, these individuals are not counted in the team score. Thus, when I was a senior in high school, I was 44th in the state meet, but I had a team score of 28, since there were 16 runners ahead of me who had qualified as individuals rather than with a team.

I’d like to point out that even if an athlete doesn’t count in the team score, it does not mean that they do not contribute to the team in a meaningful way. For one thing, we keep track of how our athletes progress on a weekly, monthly, and yearly basis, and are constantly comparing the times they ran in their most recent race to times they’ve run on the same course a month or a year ago – and we celebrate any improvements. For another, a team’s culture is entirely dependent on the people who make the team up – and all athletes, regardless of ability level, help shape the team’s attitude and values. An athlete might never score a point for the team but could be a huge contributor in terms of the spirit and work ethic they bring to practice on a daily basis. Conversely, and sad to say, there have been times as a coach where I have witnessed talented athletes who frequently scored low points in meets but who had such a negative attitude during practice that their worth to the team was ultimately negative. An athlete who shows up to practice, works hard, and continually tries to push and encourage his teammates is an invaluable asset to the team; an athlete who slacks off in practice, tries to persuade his teammates to take it easy, or who bad mouths those who work hard can be absolutely detrimental to the team’s success.

There is a difference between simply finishing a competition versus truly racing. The most common way to distinguish the casual fan from the well-seasoned veteran is to watch their reaction when an athlete, in the last 100 meters of a race, looks like they were shot out of a cannon as they sprint like mad down the final straightaway. The casual fan will likely cheer wildly and think the athlete deserving of praise; the coach, meanwhile, will shake his head in frustration, knowing that if said athlete had that much energy left at the race’s end, it meant they didn’t push themselves nearly hard enough in the earlier parts of the course. I like to compare running a race to writing a poem: anyone can write a poem, but that doesn’t mean every poem you write is a good. Likewise, we as coaches generally can distinguish right away between a race that represents an athlete’s best effort, versus a race where they did not run up to their potential. Our goal as coaches is to help athletes break through to a place they have never been before: to help them become the fastest racers they can be. Thus, we will not say “good job” after every race if the athlete, in our estimation, did not do as well as they could have. We’ll give them encouragement to do better next time, certainly, but will not offer false praise.

As parents, however, the best role you can play IS to give that unconditional support. The best thing my parents did for me as an athlete was simply to let me know that they supported my dream to be a great runner and to remind me that they cared for me whether I placed first or last.

On that note, I’d like to close with some advice for any parents reading this who have children than have expressed a wish to become the best runner they can be. As a coach, I sometimes view my role as akin to a doctor giving advice to a patient: rather than tell the patient what he/she must do, I simply state what the likely outcomes are for different treatments. As this Cross Country season comes to a close (there are only two weeks left for most athletes, and a month left for Varsity) the single most important choice an athlete can make to improve is to continue running all year round. There are no short cuts. I know many freshman often consider joining other sports, but the fact of the matter is that the athletes who make the biggest jumps from freshman year to sophomore year are the ones who join the track team and run with us year round. The best recent example is this year’s sophomore (note: now juniors)team – they are currently 4-1 in duals, and will most likely be 5-1 after Thursday. This past weekend, they beat LT at Locktoberfest, the one team they lost to in the duals. They will have a shot at winning Conference, something no team on any level has done at Hinsdale Central…ever. And yet, these guys were 1-5 as freshman, and 5th in Conference. What changed? Alex Dominao, Matt McBrien, Josh Feldman, Matt Tobia, Sean O’Flaherty, Austin Klebber, Nick Tandle, Stefan Rosas, and Alex Lambert all continued to run after cross country ended last year, first joining the ‘polar bear’ winter running club, then participating in indoor and outdoor track, and finally coming to run on a daily basis with our summer running program. What a world of difference it has made!