Cherry Creek Invitational start lists

Heritage's Richard Weigang ran well in the opener at the Cheyenne Mountain Stampede and will look to tame a faster course at Cherry Creek tonight. Photo by Alan Versaw.

There are 22 teams making their respective ways to this afternoon's Cherry Creek Invitational. Those teams include Arapahoe, Bear Creek, Chatfield, Cheyenne Central, Columbine, Denver South, Doherty, Douglas County, Fort Collins, George Washington, Grand Junction, Heritage, Highlands Ranch, Lakewood, Liberty, Mullen, Sheridan, STEM, Thornton, Vista Peak, Wheat Ridge, and, of course, the host school of Cherry Creek.

I'll go out on a limb here and predict the small schools aren't going to win this meet. But, at least one very interesting story should play out between the girls of Cherry Creek and Fort Collins. As you will recall, these two schools met last week at Arapahoe, but both rosters were short a key runner or two. We'll see if that's the case again this week, but the names on the list of entries aren't always necessarily the names of the athletes in uniform when the gun goes off.

For that matter, we'll also see if the Fort Collins boys are running fully loaded. Once again, the list of entries looks promising, but...

Although this Cherry Creek Invitational might be slightly subdued relative to previous years in terms of the list of highly competitive teams coming to the event, there's still plenty of interesting battles, both team and individual, to be played out.

Check back here at Colorado Track XC this evening for results. A coverage story for the meet will appear either this evening or sometime on Saturday.

2013 Cherry Creek Invitational results