More championships are coming to Apalachee Regional Park Championship Cross-Country Course

On Wednesday, 11 December 2013, the NCAA announced 82 championship sites for the years 2014-2018. Among these was the Division 1 South Region Cross Country Championship, which was awarded to Florida State University for the 2014 and 2016 seasons. That includes both men's and women's competition. The Seminoles will be hosting the meets at Leon County's Apalachee Regional Park Championship Cross Country Course.


FSU had already hosted the NCAA-D1 South Region at ARPXC in 2012; it's starting to look like the meet will be in Tallahassee in even-numbered years. The FACA Senior All-Star Cross-Country Classic has been held at Apalachee Regional Park each year since the course opened, and Florida's High School State Cross-Country Finals were contested there in 2012 and 2013. The big prize, of course, would be the NCAA-D1 National Championship, but that's many years off. Indiana State, a ten-time host of the national meet, will host the championships yet again in 2014 and 2016 on the LaVern Gibson Championship Course in Terre Haute, Indiana. In 2017 the championship will be at E. P. Tom Sawyer State Park in Louisville, Kentucky. The 2015 meet will be at some non-Tallahassee venue that has yet to be determined. The NCAA seems to be scheming to combine the Division 1, Division 2, and Division 3 meets in 2015; six races at one site on November 21. That would be 48 kilometers of racing in one morning, which almost seems like too much of a good thing.


Other than that, the Atlantic Coast Conference cross-country championship will be back in Tallahassee one of these years, and you can expect to see that on the Apalachee Regional Park course. Who knows? Perhaps someday the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference will get tired of sending its cross-country runners to Princess Anne, Maryland, every fall, in which case Florida A&M University could host the conference championship at ARPXC. It could happen.


Links

• 2014-2018 NCAA Championship Sites
  http://www.ncaa.com/news/ncaa/article/2013-12-11/2014-18-ncaa-championship-sites
  
  
• Find a race to run anywhere within 100 miles of ARPXC using the Trouble Afoot! calendar
  http://troubleafoot.blogspot.com/search/label/calendar?max-results=1
  
  

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