What's left of the cross-country season

A crude map for following America's fastest youngsters over the next two weeks

For observers in the United States, the Division I Cross-Country Championships signal either the effective end of the season or an inflection point along the way to the real conclusion—the Champs Sports National Finals (formerly sponsored by Kinney, Foot Locker, and Eastbay) in San Diego.

The NCAA D-I and D-III Championships took place last weekend, while D-II Nationals are next Friday in Washington State. In many years, the D-II Nationals is essentially a re-run of the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference Championships, as the RMAC includes Colorado schools Adams State, Western State, the Colorado School of Mines, and Metro State. ASU has in years past fielded teams capable of qualifying for the D-I Nationals, but those days may be over.

At the high-school level, things are similarly asynchronous. There are three paths fast prep harriers can now take, depending on where they live.

Nike Cross Series (NXN): Five of the eight regional championships were held on one of the past two weekends, whereas the Northeast, New York, and Southeast races are today. The national finals are next Saturday in (of course) Portland, Oregon, which in less than fifty years will be less populous than Portland, Maine.

The New England Northeast and New York races are on the same course in Wappinger Falls, New York. That action starts at 12:05 EST (that is, soon) and is being streamed for a fee on RunnerSpace. The reason for the lateness on the schedule of these two races is New York and Massachusetts not having their state finals until last weekend. That really ought to change. I don’t know why New York’s excuse is, but Massachusetts should either scrap or move the Frank Mooney Coaches Invitational in late October and make some effort to harmonize its schedule with the rest of the region’s, even if the state can’t be convinced to return to the New Englands again and at least legitimize the name of the meet.

Champs Sports: Three of the four regional races (Northeast, Midwest, South) are today, whereas the West Regionals are one week from now because California is staging its state meets today. California, rather than be encouraged to change anything about its high-school cross-country schedule, should be expunged from the U.S. outright, even if this unduly punishes innocent residents who want no part of the state’s administrative lunacies.

Note that the URL for this one is still footlockercc.com, just as it was during Eastbay’s ephemeral stewardship of the series. Also note that kids from New England, New York, or the states included in the NXN Southeast region who want to run in both the NXN and Champs Sports series have a scheduling conflict.

If a kid is really good—and this applies to all regions—he or she can wind up racing in both national finals. NXN holds open (at least notice) five at-large bids for kids who skip the regional meets, although I don’t think Champs Sports offers any analogous “any golden tickets” to its finals in two weeks based on a sufficiently high placing in Portland.

Garmin RunningLane Championships: This is a one-off meet that will take place in Huntsville, Alabama next Saturday. Last year, the meet produced times so mind-boggling that coaches with long scraggly beards and thousand-yard states are still walking the course daily with old-school measuring wheels and posting “Yep, it can’t be 5,000 meters but it is” to the Letsrun forum with similar regularity.

This event is in direct conflict with the NXN finals. Because it awards titles to both teams and individuals, I am unsure at this point of what the results of competing incentives will be. That is, I know k, kids who want to run fast will head for Alabama, whereas teams with a history in Nike’s series will probably keep aiming to accumulate titles and high placing in Portland.

After today, obviously, there won’t be as many mysteries left.

Every year, I become more skeptical about the viability of the Champs Sports series. Having the geographical boundaries of four regions the same as they were in the late 1970s has created population imbalances thanks to migration within the country, and it’s always been strange that kids from Grand Junction, Colorado and Steubenville, Ohio are in the same region. (When someone refers to Colorado as “the Midwest,” they’re announcing having moved here from California.)