Cross Country Is a Great Sport

Actually, as pure a sport as there is.  A lone, individual effort, transformed into a very nice team sport with a scoring system easy enough to understand and yet complicated enough to be interesting.

I have been to many levels of the sport so far this year:

• Junior High/Middle School practice
• High School Junior Varsity races
• High School Dual Meets
• High School Invitationals
• Division III Invitationals
• Division II Invitationals
• University Club Meets and Invitationals
• Open Invitationals

And I'll soon be visiting Happy Valley for a Division I Invitational the same day as the Penn State University Athletic Conference Championships.

Yesterday I saw several races at the Carlisle High School Invitational in Carlisle, PA.  There were more than 100 teams there from Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, New Jersey and  New York.  And that's the States I'm sure about.  There may be more!  All of them converged on a high school in the middle of Carlisle, PA!  There were 7 separate races run, one of which had more than 500 runners. (217, 356, 189, 527, 157, 397, 435 for a total of 2,278 runners!)  Go ahead, I know someone will check my math...  My daughter's team placed 2nd 4th in the whole meet! (The Boys team did get 2nd overall!)

1/4 of the start of the Girls JV race. Freshman Daughter the Younger somewhere to the left... the same slot that the PSU Alumni team will have at the Penn State National!

Just the first of 7 races.

 Penn State Track and Field Alumni Golfers were there in force, but I only had the opportunity to see a few because there were so many people.  (Yogi Berra would say "You can't see anyone, there are too many people!")  But I did run into Artie Gilkes and Rebecca Donaghue, coaching the State College High School Little Lions.  Artie has been hired as my personal security force for the next golf outing also.  He's bringing the foil.

Artie "Knuckles" Gilke

Rebecca Donaghue

Literally, a 1/10th of the buses involved.

Artie had come from spending time with Coach Groves at his hospital room on Friday.  He assures me Coach is feisty and they won't be able to keep him long.  All of us at the blog with it all are wishing him a speedy recovery.