Cross Country Points Guide

Every place counts……

There have been a few conversations lately about the scoring system in XC so hopefully this makes it all a bit clearer.

The points scoring works by adding the finish positions for your first X runners to make a Team score, usually 6 for men and 4 for women, these are the Counters.

So 1st scores 1 point, 2nd scores 2, etc.  With the lowest cumulative score being the winning Team.

It’s great to see so many NYMAC vests out on course in an XC race and even better to see them finishing so highly up.  What we need is to pack the field early on and get as many of our runners out as we can.

But it’s not just the Counters that count.

While it’s true that we want our first 6 to cross the line with as high a finish position as possible we also want everyone else to cross in as high a place as possible.  This is because we can then push Counters for other clubs further down.

So in the below examples you can see the difference it makes.

Here we finish above a local rival with great grouping from our runners; 

NYMAC           121

Rival Club        125

But now if we remove some of your non-counters it improves the Rivals finish positions without changing ours and means that they then finish with a better total than we do;

Rival Club        120

NYMAC           121

Removing our non-Counters that finished in positions 36, 38 & 41 gives the rival the 5 points they need to just get in front of us.  So it’s true that they weren’t Counters for NYMAC but they did have a major part to play in the Team score.

It’s not always front of the pack runners that this is relevant for, at Preston Park recently the Final Counter for each club was in the following positions;

All of our runners finished in front of the final Counter.  Every place really does count.