Cross country is an individual race and a team race at the same time. Here's how the team score works.
The basics
- Each team's top five finishers score. Their places are added up, and the lowest total wins. A perfect score is 15 (1-2-3-4-5).
- A team's 6th and 7th runners are "displacers." They don't add to their own team's score, but they take up places, pushing other teams' scorers back.
- Runners from schools without a full team (fewer than five finishers) are usually removed from team scoring, and places are re-numbered among scoring runners only.
Ties
Ties are broken by the sixth runner: the team whose sixth runner finished ahead wins. (If a team has no sixth runner, the team that does wins the tie.)
Why your scored place can differ from your overall place
Results list an overall place and a team "points" place. If you finished 14th overall but three runners ahead of you were individual entries from incomplete teams, you score 11 points. That's why Hy-Tek Meet Manager results show both columns.
Close races decide championships
Team titles are often decided by a few points — which is why every displacer matters, and why a team's fifth runner is often called its most important. Browse county and State Qualifier results on our cross country pages to see how close the races have been.
Hosting a cross country meet? We time and score it.