The Course of Events: What's Up With Our Home Meet?

We're less than three months away from opening racing season at Jackson.  Second on the slate is our home meet.  It's hard to believe we're twelve years removed from the first race Coach Terry Wood brought to the Seminary Picnic Grounds.  In the years since, the meet has undergone a few changes while establishing a beautiful tradition.

Since last year's meet, I've taken in the feedback from coaches, parents, and athletes and tried to make changes where possible to address them.  In this post I'd like to discuss some of those changes and the reasons for them.

Moving to Thursday

The first change, which many of you already know of, is the date of our meet.  With the exception of 2018, our meet has always been on a Wednesday.  Most often that's the week before Labor Day, but every 6 or so years, MSHSAA rolls the athletic calendar forward one week to keep practices from eventually starting in July.  2024 is one of those years.

We ideally want to keep our meet in the same week relative to other meets and the MSHSAA calendar.  This year the Jackson Meet will be the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, so our meet will happen the following week.  That creates some logistics issues with setting up for the meet.  Normally we work on the course the day after Jackson, but I don't want to take the majority of everyone's holiday weekend for both a race and a course build day.  My preference would be to give runners and their families both Sunday and Monday away from cross country.

But doing this and keeping the meet on Wednesday doesn't leave much time for race preparation, both for runners and the course.  This would especially be true in the event of wet weather.  Pushing the meet back to Thursday allows for time to get the course ready for racing.

At the same time, looking at the broader calendar of races, there is some rationale.  Since our meet typically falls before Labor Day, there aren't many meets in our area the following Saturday.  Some elite teams travel to Memphis for the City Auto Twilight Classic, but most (like us) simply don't race again until the following Saturday at Arcadia Valley or Forest Park.  

For 2024, Dexter did choose to move their meet from October to the Saturday following ours.  However, because Tennessee doesn't play by MSHSAA rules, the Twilight Meet is the weekend before ours this year.   That puts us in a fortuitous situation with little competition from other meets for team registration.

Interestingly, the biggest draw away from our meet is Jackson.  Like myself, many coaches aren't keen on racing twice in five days, meaning they aren't going to bring their teams to Jackson and the picnic grounds.  By pushing our meet back a day, we give teams that run Jackson less reason to not do our meet as well without creating many conflicts with later meets.  And for those who already do both, their athletes have an extra day of recovery to hopefully bring even faster times to our course!

For both of these reasons, it made sense to move our meet to Thursday.  Even in future years when our meet eventually rolls before Labor Day, I still think we'll be in a better position to recruit teams.

Updates to the Course

One of the cooler things about using our course all season last year is that now you can see it from space.  One of the not cooler things is that you can also see the gravel that’s been added along the fence that runs parallel to Five-Mile Drive (Sycamore Road), outlined in yellow in the image above.  There’s not enough space between the gravel and the barbed wire fence to fit 150 runners in the first 800m of a race.  With a little landscaping, I think we can run on the other side of the gravel, but that will take a little length off the course.

Repeatedly in feedback from our runners and those on other teams, one of the more concerning areas of our course was the downhill stretch just past the three-way at the end of the opening straightaway (marked in pink).  It weaves between some larger trees, making the course both sloped and choppy.  

​The other is the stretch just past the bathrooms that follows the gravel road (marked in green).  Runners either have to stay on the road-and anyone who’s run Oak Ridge knows how much fun gravel in spikes is–or stick to the narrow strip of grass along the tree line, which is slanted and speckled with a couple water meter covers waiting for the toe of an unsuspecting athlete.  

Neither of these stretches can be easily fixed with a skid steer.  Furthermore, the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS)--the national governing body for high school sports that MSHSAA adheres to pretty closely–recommends that all courses end with a straightaway of at least 150yd.  Our current finish is only roughly 100yd.  If we ever want our course to be considered as a host site for district races down the road, this would have to be fixed.

Addressing all of these things requires a few changes to our course, all of which you can see in the image below.  The problem areas are both avoided in the high school race, and the finish stretch is extended back to the old three-way, now well over 200 yd.  

I tried to color-code the routes to make them easier to follow. The green back loop on the high school course will still be run clockwise as in previous years.

Middle School Races

Reexamining the course also allowed an opportunity to address a recommendation from the survey I sent out following last year’s meet.  A desire was expressed to get more teams to attend.  That's easier said than done.  There's a lot of inertia in cross country race schedules.  Schools don't usually add or drop meets without good reason. 

Besides running a smooth meet on a nice course that generates fast times, one of the easiest ways to draw new teams is to add middle school races.  Many schools seek out meets that offer both high school and middle school races to make logistics simpler for their schedules.  The front loop of the new course combined with the finish of the old course comes out to almost exactly 3200m, which just so happens to be MSHSAA’s current recommendation to standardize middle school race lengths.  

This year's meet will follow the schedule below:
4:00 Middle School Boys
4:30 Middle School Girls
5:00 HS Boys 
5:45 HS Girls

Our meet will begin with middle school races before the high school races take off.  This pushes the high school race times back an hour, hopefully allowing for cooler races.  And in the event of extreme heat, the new course allows the middle school race to be shortened to close to a mile, while the high school races could use the middle school course.

And maybe one day down the road, SV will have its own junior high team to join the competition!

Timing and Staffing

The current plan is to still time our races manually.  The cost of a professional timing service is quite steep.  One of the other things that makes our meet attractive is the affordable entry fee, and so we really want to avoid anything that would raise that significantly.

We used a variety of contingencies to determine finish places at last year's meet.  While the bib scanning was innovative, it simply led to too many issues.  It's just hard in general to tear a bib off a sweaty and semi-nauseous runner hunched over if not sprawled out on the ground.  Glares from the sun also interfered with the camera scanners, slowing down the process.

The far more reliable approach we found last year was simply writing down the bib numbers of runners as they finished.  This does require the additional work of manually entering them into the scoring system.  However, upon review after the meet, the written results matched the video results perfectly.  Much of that credit goes to Kirt and Olivia Tomlinson, our amazing spotters.

Next year we will still do video as a last resort and have spotters (possibly two sets) to record bib numbers, but we won't be tearing the bibs, let alone scan them.  This change should free up a few workers at the finish line.  And with twice the races, we are going to need plenty of workers.  I should have signups for workers ready in time for our parent meeting before the season starts.  

Of course if anyone has $5500, we could certainly time the meet ourselves.

Awards and
​Post-Race Dinner

Two key elements of our meet for as long as I have been involved with the program are the award ceremony and the post-meet potluck meal.  But with the addition of middle school races, the meet is going to end at least an hour later than in previous years.  With two more races,  the award ceremony would take almost twice as long.  

One possible compromise solution would be to still introduce seniors and do team awards, but to give out individual medals as runners finish like at many other meets.  I'm certainly open to alternative suggestions as well.

As for the dinner, I do think regardless of the award ceremony that we would be battling darkness and bugs by the time we got around to eating, especially if we clean up first.  With most families at the picnic grounds for several hours before the dinner watching and working the meet, keeping foods hot/cold has always been a challenge.  At the same time, our potluck meal is one of the greatest demonstrations of the family nature of our team, and we don't want to lose that.

What we decided was to hold our final course build after practice on the Tuesday (9/3) before our meet.  We will make sure the course is marked, bathrooms and tent city are ready for action, and team packets are organized.  Then our potluck team dinner will follow.  This will be in lieu of a pasta dinner for our meet.  

I realize change is rarely easy or fun, but I do think that in conjunction with the meet moving to Thursday and adding two races, this is the best path forward.

Non-traditional awards are one of the things that has come to define our meet. We definitely want to keep those around as well!

​The Closing Stretch

I hope this post has provided some insight into the what and why of the changes to our meet for this year.  But if you do still have any questions or if you aren't a team parent and would like to help with the meet, by all means reach out!