For the most part, scrimmages are behind us. If you kept your ear very closely to the ground, you may have heard a piece of news or two rising out of scrimmage meets, but word about scrimmage meets needs to go by word-of-mouth and not by media.
So, for all intents and purposes, this weekend is the unveiling of the 2016 cross country season. And, it should be a very fun unveiling.
The Cheyenne Mountain Stampede alone will host close to half of the well over 200 cross country programs in the state. That will happen on Friday afternoon. This meet must be watched closely, as schools do not typically hold their top runners out of this meet. To do so would be to defeat the purpose of having a pre-state meet.
So, whatever we learn from west-side Colorado Springs on Friday afternoon will be real information about the season to follow. Leading up to that spectacle, Colorado Track XC is publishing CM Stampede previews for each of the four classifications. And, Colorado Track XC will be deep into coverage of the Stampede.
But, the Stampede is far from the only race to be found this weekend.
On Thursday, it will be the Aurora City Championships (any school with an Aurora address) and the New Balance Valmont meet at the Valmont Bike Park on the east side of Boulder.
Any time you tack something like "City Championships" onto the name of a meet you expect teams to step things up a notch. In recent years, though, at least some of the Aurora teams have taken a bit of a lower-key approach to this meet. We shall see which sentiment prevails this year, but you do not need to look surprised if a few teams send sub-varsity squads to race here.
The New Balance Valmont meet predictably draws a crowd that includes Lyons, Longmont, Centaurus, Mountain Range, Broomfield, and a few other schools from somewhat greater distances. This meet yielded the first hints last fall of how strong the Broomfield girls would end up being. The format of this meet is quite different from the usual, featuring a melding of smaller races within the bigger race. Last year's meet scoring will give you an idea. No other meet in the state scores this way, and who will be running in which races is a strategic decision made more or less on the spot by the coaches involved.
I have no official word on how the bikers feel about having their spot appropriated by unhelmeted bipeds during prime Thursday afternoon hours late in August.
I will, of course, gin up an article or two on the Valmont meet that will merge the results of the meet into conventional scoring so that it's easier for the masses to interpret the bigger picture meaning of the meet. Figure, though, that those articles will make a case for becoming a MileSplit Pro member.
Friday will be the big day of the weekend. We have, of course, the CM Stampede, but Holy Family, Mountain Vista, and Cherry Creek will also be hosting.
With Holy Family back in the ranks of 3A this year, figure that this meet will feature a good number of 3A and smaller 4A Denver metro teams--just not the same teams that are pointed at the CM Stampede (unless, that is, some of those teams send their JV programs to Holy Family). Right now, though, I don't have very clear list of teams headed to Broomfield for this one.
But, I do know we have the man, the myth, and the legend (Ben Hershelman, sans 70s-era moustache) sent out to cover this meet. The fact that Jefferson Academy is looking like a 3A contender this fall helped to make that an even easier decision than it already was.
Far on the other side of the Denver Metro area, Mountain Vista hosts a two-mile event at their on-campus criterium course. The loop is all of 1200 meters, and the total race distance ends up being two miles rather than a full 5K.
There are two mutually exclusive race strategies to employ at Mountain Vista. One, you can try to get out ahead of the movable green wall and keep running fast enough to avoid getting trampled. Or, two, you can get out behind the movable green wall and try to find a weakness to punch your way through before two miles are up. Good luck with that. The two strategies have shown roughly equal success rates to date. I can, however, assure you that the adrenaline factor is higher with option one.
Joining Mountain Vista on their home campus will be Palmer Ridge, Dakota Ridge, Erie, Frontier Academy (Hannah Brown probably put in that request), Mead, Niwot, Peak to Peak, Pine Creek, and Rock Canyon. If this field was coming later in the season and as a weather event instead of a cross country meet, it would probably be scored as a Class 5 Hurricane.
Last, but certainly not least, on Friday is the Cherry Creek Steve Lohman meet. The meet begins and ends at Cherry Creek High School and tours the corner of Cherry Creek State Park along the way. Historically, this meet hosts a very strong field of 20 or so teams. I do not, however, have a lot of details to share yet on the team composition for this year's edition of the meet.
Saturday is only a bit more subdued than Friday. Green Mountain has a scrimmage on Saturday. Basalt hosts what figures to be a decent gathering of Western Slope 3A-ish kind of programs at Crown Mountain Park, Paonia competes with Basalt for schools at their Jumbo Mountain Run, and D'Evelyn has turned their traditional Dash from a scrimmage into a bona fide meet.
Given all the rest that's going on over the weekend, I rather expect the Saturday meets to be mostly smaller kinds of affairs. The D'Evelyn Dash figures to be something of an exception, though.
The list of teams for D'Evelyn's home affair goes 25 strong. A few of those schools do, however, overlap with listed team entries for the Cheyenne Mountain Stampede, so we could be seeing some cases of sending varsity to the Stampede and sub-varsity here. Or, if a coach is feeling especially old-school this weekend, they could be racing varsity teams both Friday and Saturday.
The bad news is that you, individually, are probably only likely to be able to make it to one meet this weekend. The good news is that results and articles will be going up all weekend, and you can keep coming back here to see what all the other teams in the state are up to.
Welcome, cross country season!