After the remains of the Northwest's bomb cyclone and atmospheric river have flowed on, the CIAC girls' XC teams will be battling it out on Monday for six different Class championships at the Divisional meet. At least half of team contests should be pretty close, and there will certainly be a lot of exciting finishes at the top, though the Class S race is expected to be more about whether Rachel St. Germain can break into Wickham Park's top-10 all-time marks at around 18:00 after pumping out an 18:16 at the Wickham Park Invite three weeks ago.
Deciphering the clues about how CT teams stack up is challenging since the squads run on courses of many different distances and terrain types, meet results are sketchily reported and some of the league contests including the Berkshire never sent in their data, and few of the teams ran in meets that got speed rated. So as always, there is a huge amount of uncertainty about what will happen at the Divisional meet.
For the bigger classes, we have tried to use some historic data to estimate what a team's average time would be on a standard day running the Wickham Park 5K. Some 5K courses such as the Veteran's Memorial Park used by the Naugatuck Valley Conference appear to run extremely fast in comparison to WP, and same is true for Waveny Park where the FCIAC girls run short 4K races that need to also have a conversion factor thrown in. Apologies to any deserving team that was missed, but again, if a team runs in the forest and no one hears the results . . .
So we've made our best stab at putting together a lineup of the six girls Class races, which begin on Monday for them with M race at 9:45 AM and end off with the SS race at 3:40 PM.
Check out the Class race previews below.
Class Previews | |
|---|---|
Class LL Championship | Class L Championship |
Class MM Championship | Class M Championship |
Class SS Championship | Class S Championship |