Sometimes rankings don't tell you all you want to know. You want to dig deeper and get a detailed analysis of how two athletes compare. Here's how.
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Cross country team scoring is closely related to doing virtual meets, but has some built-in features that virtual meets do not that give it some flexibility to do some intriguing things. Accessing cross country team scoring is simple. Simply click on Rankings on the main navigation bar, and scroll down to XC Team Scores. From there, click on either boys or girls and you will be taken to the main dashboard for cross country team scoring. Along the way, the system will calculate the team scoring for a virtual meet for all the teams in the state for the most current season.
But, you probably want something more refined than this. That's where the dashboard comes in:
There are a lot of things you can do from here. One of the more powerful things you might want to do is to do cross country scoring based off of track and field times. You can accomplish this by changing the season at the top to Outdoor, make sure you have the Year set to the season of track and field you want to pull from, and then changing Event to whatever track distance you want to rank by. Theoretically, you can do the same off of indoor times, though for most states there aren't enough individuals running indoor events to make for much possibility of doing team scoring.
You can narrow your XC Team scoring down to a particular classification, region, district, county, or league with the League dropbox. You can set the utility to look only at upcoming seasons by excluding certain grades of students in the Returning dropbox.
Sometimes--and especially when you're doing XC Team Scoring for upcoming years or for track and field marks--you may not have many teams with five available athletes to rank. In that case, you may want set the number of scorers to three for four to bring more teams into the picture. This is easy to do through the Scorers per Team dropbox.
We've discussed the main features of the XC Team Scoring dashboard, but as you can see, there's more exploring with settings that you can do on your own. Feel free to try things out on your own.
If you are puzzled by some aspect of XC Team Scoring, please feel welcome to post a question on the comments for this article. We'll get you the answer you need.