Two Peninsulas Are Better Than One? A Hypothetical Statewide XC Championship
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