How would you format a CoEd High School Cross Country Race?

Looks like you are confused because you have not defined what you mean by "fastest program". After you come up with a definition, ask yourself if "it" can be determined from a traditional format. The answer is most likely, yes. Then you will figure out that your idea will probably result in none of the girls finishing in the top 6. Finally, you will realize that you twisted yourself into a pretzel for nothing.

Why wouldn't you just run it with traditional scoring then add the boys and girls team scores together?

tycobb wrote:

Why wouldn't you just run it with traditional scoring then add the boys and girls team scores together?

+1 Don't mess with staggered starts. Run everybody together. Score the boys race. Score the girls race. Add team score together.

Film Rep wrote:

tycobb wrote:

Why wouldn't you just run it with traditional scoring then add the boys and girls team scores together?

+1 Don't mess with staggered starts. Run everybody together. Score the boys race. Score the girls race. Add team score together.

I don’t doubt that this is good advice, but my brain has to understand WHY it is a bad idea. Can you educate me?

I like the idea that we won’t know who will win - a boy or a girl - with a staggered start.

help me brainstorm please wrote:

Film Rep wrote:

+1 Don't mess with staggered starts. Run everybody together. Score the boys race. Score the girls race. Add team score together.

I don’t doubt that this is good advice, but my brain has to understand WHY it is a bad idea. Can you educate me?

I like the idea that we won’t know who will win - a boy or a girl - with a staggered start.

If you are looking for a gimmick to make your race stand out and be different then maybe a staggered start would be ok. There are plenty of possible issues including making sure you have a course that is wide enough to pass the entire time. There is no good magic number to make it equal, usually bigger gaps between the top girls and the rest of the girls field compared to the top boys and the rest of the boys.

We have a coed race in my area and everyone starts together. The boys and girls for each team are score separately and then those two scores are added together for the schools overall score and the team title for the invite is decided that way. Top 10 or 20 get ribbons or medals. If your giving the girls a 2:30 head start or whatever it is thats a battle of the sexes race and isn't the same thing. You could do that and then score just the first 5 for each team across the line regardless of sex.

help me brainstorm please wrote:

Film Rep wrote:

+1 Don't mess with staggered starts. Run everybody together. Score the boys race. Score the girls race. Add team score together.

I don’t doubt that this is good advice, but my brain has to understand WHY it is a bad idea. Can you educate me?

I like the idea that we won’t know who will win - a boy or a girl - with a staggered start.

I just think that having guys who are running 16-17 minute pace have to dodge and go around girls that are walking or running like 25 minute pace is dangerous and silly. If I were a girl 🤔 I would want to start with the guys and see how many guys I could beat.

Maybe run one gender first, then figure out how many point each team needs to win with the other gender, then race that other gender. Could build some suspense.

We had a co-ed xc meet in HS that was a relay meet. Each school would enter teams of 5 runners with at least 2 of each sex. So the varsity teams were always 3 boys and 2 girls. It was a 3k loop course where each runner runs one relay leg. It was really fun. The course was slow so the times were meaningless but it was fun.

If you want to make it really fun have the guys run the course backwards. Then they can pass the girls head on. Embrace the chaos of a finish line where runners are finishing from both sides.

Good luck!

help me brainstorm please wrote:

Film Rep wrote:

+1 Don't mess with staggered starts. Run everybody together. Score the boys race. Score the girls race. Add team score together.

I don’t doubt that this is good advice, but my brain has to understand WHY it is a bad idea. Can you educate me?

I like the idea that we won’t know who will win - a boy or a girl - with a staggered start.

There's a local competition between schools that works like this. Just add the 2 team scores together.

This is why: otherwise, the results end up being extremely sensitive to what time you pick for the stagger between starts. How confident are you that 2:30 is exactly the precise time you need for a fair race between boys and girls? (Unless you're a complete idiot, you have no confidence in this at all.) If 2:30 is too much, the girls will dominate. If it's too slow, the boys will dominate. Trying to reduce the difference between adolescent male and female runners to one number and hoping for a good outcome is folly. You'll most likely end up looking like a paleoconservative monster who just added a token girl to the boys' scores, or a woke zealot who wanted to show that girls are superior to boys all along. Don't go down that road. Just score each race separately and add up the two scores.

I actually think you have convinced me that it is a bad idea!

Many thanks for your time!

I like the idea of changing things up but a delayed start 5k is probably not the way to go. I can just picture a 19:30 girl getting passed by 10 guys in the last 200 meters.

We do an early season hokum karem where the varsity is 4 pairs each running 3 miles and the combined time from the top 3 of those pairs is your team score. You could do something like this with co-ed pairs and score your first 4-5 pairs. Much like the combined 4x4 it would be fun to see different strategies.

I think a relay is the way to go. Teams can decide on any order, but they have to run 5 girls and 5 boys. This might take some time (hours!) but you save time by consolidating boys and girls races. Plus each team only has one runner on the course at any given time, so a lot more schools can compete in one race, compared to what the course normally allows for.

If you want to expedite, you could do a kind of modified relay. For this you would need to have the course set up so that the start and finish are basically right next to each other. Pick one gender to go first - they all start together like a normal xc race. (Let's use boys 1st for this example, but it would work just as well the other way around.) When the first boy runner from a team finishes, one one girl from that team starts running. When the second boy on that team finishes, another girl starts running. Then, you score it like a normal meet, using the place that the girls finish in. Advantages of this are you can enter 7 runners per gender, and it takes less time than a 10x5k.

First of all, in 2021 gender is merely a social construct.

Seriously though, I don’t like the staggered start idea. If the course accommodates the field size, it might be best to start everyone at the same time and score the top 3 from each gender. It should be really fun for the boys to finish and turn around and cheer for the girls. And fun for the girls to try to beat some boys. A fun day everyone is the way high school meets should be.

How about this idea -

You enter a team of 10 runners -- 5 boys and 5 girls. All runners start on the line together, like a normal XC race. Score the top 3 boys and top 3 girls from each team.