As difficult as it might be for you folks in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada to believe, the season is already well underway in Utah. There's not a lot to report yet out of Utah, but there is a little.
This article will focus mostly on a single meet, the Highland Cross Country Invitational. This meet uses at least parts of the Utah state meet course, but does not complete the entire circuit that will be used in October. As such, it comes up short of three miles, so it's not particularly useful for time comparison.
What we did see at the Highland meet was a nice piece of domination by the Timpagnogos boys. If you're taken back by that, you haven't followed Utah cross country very closely the last couple of years. Timpanogos has a well-earned reputation for excellence and posted a score of 59 to 105 for second-place Olympus. Springville ran close to Olympus in third. None of the other heaviest hitters in Utah boys cross country were present at the meet, but complete results are located at the link above.
Timpanogos, by the way, is being led by the Brothers Benson, Joseph (senior) and Brennan (junior). It's a reasonable wager you'll recognize those to names a bit more by the end of the season than you do now.
Over on the girls side of the meet, Bingham's Whitney Rich applied a thrashing to the individual field, winning by nearly 30 seconds over a course that was at least a very good part of three miles.
American Fork's girls did show up for this one (the boys and girls are coached separately at American Fork and often show up at different meets). Although the AF girls didn't seem to be occupying their usual mostly single-digit set of places, they successfully came way with about half the score of anyone else. The Cavewomen had 79 to 141 for Timpanogos. As I said, though, the placement for American Fork was uncharacteristic. Sara Musselman was the lone top-ten finisher for AF in third.
Skyline, Riverton, and new school Skyridge rounded out the top five, all making a successful case for getting some further attention down the road.
We also got a little glimpse of some small-school action at the Premier Invitiational (which was evidently not the premiere event of Utah season this year) on August 13. You'll see Stansbury dominating the boys 1A-2A-3A division of that meet, but Stansbury does not meet the small-school criterion of enrollment of less than 1000 students. Second-place Grantsville does, however, and we're already familiar with Grantsville as a Utah small-school power. They did nothing to tarnish that reputation here with a solid showing.
Grantsville also played runner-up to Stansbury's lead in the boys race, though their showing was not quite at the level posted by the Grantsville boys.
That's what we have for now. I won't always be able to go into this much depth on meets around the region, but as long as Utah is the only state running, you get a little more detail on their meets for now.
Colorado ran scrimmage meets this weekend and real competition opens on Thursday. It appears that New Mexico and Nevada (barely) also open their seasons this weekend, with Arizona giving the heat another week to subside before opening on Labor Day Weekend.