Working Up Your Own State Meet Previews


There are plenty of ways to obsess over the state meet before the runners actually toe the line!

We're down to six more days until the 2017 Colorado State Cross Country Championships, and plenty of questions remain to be answered.

I will be writing previews for each classification and gender (except for 3A, which will be written by Jeff Bliven), but perhaps you want to do some exploring on your own in addition.

You are welcome and invited to do exactly that. The rest of the article will be a quick tutorial on how.

First, you need to know that I have populated "leagues" with all of the teams advancing to State in each classification and gender. This greatly simplifies the process of creating virtual meets for State. You will have to scroll down a bit in the league lists on the various virtual meet tools, but you can find these prepopulated leagues of state meet teams under names like State XC Teams - Boys 2A, State XC Teams - Girls 4A, and so forth.

Please note that individuals who qualified for State are not included in these leagues. On the other hand, they don't impact the team scoring at State.

For State virtual meets, I recommend using the Rankings/Virtual Meets option as it provides the greatest flexibility and allows you to customize adjustments to the basic virtual meet.

Once there, you will want the Build Meet From Scratch option. Click on that.

Most of the Filters and Settings will be preselected for you, but you can mess with any of those that you like. You will want to make special note, however, to change the League selection to what you need. If you are trying to do a virtual meet for 3A Boys, you will want to select State XC Teams - Boys 3A

Then click on Next. In a couple seconds, your virtual meet is done! One tab of results shows the individual scoring. A second tab shows the team scoring.

That's all pretty quick and cool, but we're not nearly done yet... 

If there are any runners you figure are out for State, you can click on the X at the end of their line in the scoring and remove them from the analysis. When you do that, the scoring is updated to reflect the change.

If you feel someone's time is too fast or too slow for the virtual meet--maybe you want to "slow down" Desert Twilight, Liberty Bell, or Joe Vigil times or adjust for a course you think was short, or perhaps you know someone is coming back from an injury and you don't feel they've yet had an opportunity to run at full speed--you can click on the edit pencil in that athlete's line and make an adjustment on their time. 

Once again, as soon as you do that, the team scoring on the next page is updated to reflect the change.

You can make as many of those changes as you like. But, if you want to reset back to the original scoring, you will need to go back and rerun the virtual meet from the top.

I'm ready, take me straight to the Virtual Meets tool right now.