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Reply to "Cross-country Participation"

Here's the question: Do cross-country courses NEED to be CERTIFIED?

The road course certification program was largely borne out of the desire of some in the sport to keep records of performances on roads. For those records to have any credibility, one had to establish that the course was indeed the distance it was advertised to be. Over the last 25 years, though, a properly measured course has become one of the essentially attributes of a competently produced event- whether records are anticipated or not.

I don't think the desire to keep records is at the top of the list of reasons to measure cross-country courses. The #1 reason to measure cross-country courses is that they are, by and large, poorly measured. The stakeholders in the sport need to have some level of confidence in the distance of the course and the locations of the marked intermediate splits. And that's how we usually try to sell road race directors on the merits of USATF certification.

Does this mean USATF certification for cross-country courses? I don't know. For performances to have credibility there needs to be a credible way to communicate that the course has been measured in accordance with accepted methods by someone who knows how to measure it.
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