By John Raffel
Cross country races under the lights are very rare.
They’re so rare that St. Johns coach Bill Sackrider can’t find records of there ever having been one in the state, and that made the Invite Under the Lights on Aug. 22 in St. Johns all the more special.
The night meet was staged at the St. Johns campus. Sackrider said it was basically on the regular course. “I had to modify it,” he said. “Part of our normal course goes at the woods. We used existing lights and [other auxiliary lighting objects] to light other areas.”
The race was the normal 3.1 miles in length, and some sections of the course were used twice.
“A good chunk of it was what we use for our regular course,” Sackrider said. “About two-thirds of it was our normal course. At no point was there complaints of [a lack of] lighting.”
Sackrider had been researching night-time cross country for about 18 months and found some places in Florida and Virginia where it had taken place. He wanted to have some type of event at St. Johns that would be unique, and he found it.
“Every year for 16 years, we’d kick the season off that night,” he said. “I was thinking of kicking off the season with a meet. When [athletic director] Chris Irvin and I talked about it, I had thought about doing it at midnight. We decided against it. It wasn’t practical. We decided to do in on the first Friday.”
The MHSAA allows cross country practices to start Aug. 13 and the first meets to be Aug. 22.
The first race featured the boys and started at 9:30 p.m. The girls race came next.
The reaction from coaches, runners and fans “was generally very positive,” Sackrider said. “There are things we know now that we can use for next year.” There are some kinks that Sackrider said can be fixed, although he indicated they are not major in scope. “We’ll do something different with the lights,” he said. “We’ll have the course lit better. We’ll do things like lighting it with Christmas lights. We want to see if we can line [the course] on the grass with some type of glow-in-the-dark paint.”
The turnout of spectators was higher than usual.
It’s unclear if other schools may try i.o stage their own night runs. “To my knowledge, no one in Michigan has done it ever,” Sackrider said. “It’s pretty rare.”
Since it was late August, the temperature was in the low 50s at night, making it very comfortable for runners. “A lot of our course is in the open with no shade,” Sackrider said. “Having it during a hot day would have been brutal.”
Beside the host school, other teams in the meet were Holt, Charlotte, Fowler, Haslett, Ithaca, and Mason.