The Michigan Cross-Country Review

       With UP and LP soccer finally being merged after years of separation (this had to go to court for some reason), there have been slight rumblings about a similar change to XC and/or track. That seems unlikely at this point, considering UP soccer didn't even have a state tournament while XC and track very much do, but what this article supposes is: what if that happened? Let's take the 2022 XC season and see how the state meet would've looked if both peninsulas competed together. The Basics      Merging the two peninsulas messes with the division cutoffs quite a bit. Most UP schools are very small - Marquette is usually the only one with a LP D1 enrollment number, and just 4-5 more fit into D2 most years. This causes a massive shift of schools up the division hierarchy: UP teams are in bold here - you can see that most of the divisional changes end up being LP teams. The seasons are also somewhat different currently, with UP finals occurring in mid-October. In the int

Folks, there's only about a month left of the season. Just over two weeks until regionals. Let's see what everyone's been up to! How the System Works I've used my Michigan Points System (name is a work in progress) a few times before, but I'll go over it again, since it's probably new to some of y'all. The basic idea comes from the USTFCCCA , with a few tweaks to make it work better for HS rankings.  Athletes get points for ranking in the top 25 in their division (20 points maximum) or for exceeding the state AQ mark (calibrated such that 20 points = average state champion mark from the past 10 seasons). This means that sometimes, more than 25 people will get points from a certain event if they've all hit the AQ. (This is already happening in the D1 boys 1600!) A few additional things to keep in mind: Because so few meets, especially early in the season, use wind gauges, I'm keeping any results that aren't blatantly incorrect. There are 200 resul