2A Cross Country by the Numbers

Last month's 2A Region 3 Boys race gets off to a competitive start. Photo by Alan Versaw.

With the biggest decision at Monday's CHSAA Cross Country Committee meeting figuring to be the 2A scoring proposal, I thought it might be worthwhile to lay some numbers on the table. Specifically, I've listed below the enrollment count for every school that participated in 2A regionals this fall, followed by their count of boys runners, followed by their count of girls runners. Due to issues of eligibility, sickness, and injury, these counts may not reflect all of the athletes each school had out for cross country, but it should give something close. I'll draw a few conclusions at the end, but let's start now with the enrollment counts and the number of athletes running at regionals for each school. Enrollment counts listed are those reported in the current edition of the CHSAA directory.

* - Lake City actually ran four boys at regionals, but one was disqualified, leaving only three finishers. Lyons actually started eight girls at regionals, but pulled one girl with an injury situation during the race.

As a rule, counts of female participants at regionals tend to be lower than counts of male participants. Probably volleyball is a stronger alternative sport for girls than football or soccer (though the number of 1A and 2A schools with boys soccer is very low) is for boys, at least for the population of student-athletes who might otherwise be interested in running cross country. Perhaps other factors are in play as well.

Clearly, some 2A schools are barely hanging on, while others are thriving. Those hanging on and those thriving do not seem to be neatly divided by enrollment count. Three eye-popping examples of thriving programs with very low enrollment counts would be Heritage Christian Academy, Ouray, and Lake City. I won't single out any schools here, but there are schools in the 2A ranks with enrollment counts over 200 that are struggling to keep their cross country programs afloat.

Schools that regularly draw participants from other surrounding schools include Limon, Rocky Ford, Peyton, Yuma, and Ouray. Generally speaking, this method of augmenting a program is going to be limited to public school programs in rural areas.

At some level, if a school consistently only has one or two athletes per gender out for cross country, it does not matter if 2A scores three or scores four. Where the scoring proposal figures to make a difference is with schools hovering around three or four athletes per gender. You could argue either that moving to four discourages the program by making it more difficult to field a team or that it nudges those same programs to take their programs to the next level by saying that three will no longer count as a complete team. I don't propose to resolve that argument here.

Schools on this list that recently did not have cross country but sent their interested athletes to neighboring schools instead include Dolores, Paonia, and Byers. Interestingly, Paonia is now one of the most robust programs in the entire 2A ranks. Some 1A/2A schools that are known to send athletes to neighboring 3A or larger schools for cross country include Hayden, Ignacio, Sanford, and Wiley.

And, as a final note, I will observe that if you look at the official 2A Boys and 2A Girls scoring from the state meet, it would appear that we are actually running 6, displacing 5, and scoring 3, rather than running 6, displacing 6 and scoring 3. This same scenario seems also to have been the case in 2015.