Scoring the North VS South XC Meet
Normally, a cross country team scores points based on the placements of their top 5 athletes. Add the finish place for each of the 5 and you've got the team total. So if the top 5 finishers for that team placed 5th, 10th, 15th, 20th & 25th, that team would score 75 points.
To encourage participation, we score EVERY finisher, not just the top 5. But what happens when one team has 10 runners, and the other only has 5? The team with the fewest runners stands a good chance of winning (fewer athletes score points). We offset this by assigning "ghost" runners to the team that has fewer runners AND these "ghost" runners finish behind everyone!
So, using the example above, a team with 10 runners will score all runners according to their finish placement. The other team will score their finishers the same way, but the "ghost" runners will be assigned places 16, 17, 18, 19 & 20. In most cases, the team that wins is the team that brought the most participants!