flrunners.com Invitational Better Than Ever, Friday Varsity Division

This year's flrunners.com Invitational is shaping up to be the best ever, as we continue our tradition of putting together Florida's largest and most elite race. We have had many inquiries and already a couple of entries from out of state teams. Our college and middle school races should grow once again. And experienced coach and meet director, Fred Finke, has taken the helm as my right-hand man and co-meet director.

There have been some concerns expressed by many Jewish athletes in the state. Unfortunately, due to the placement of Great American and the shrunken calendar, we were forced to have our meet on the same weekend as an important holiday on the Jewish calendar. We do realize the conflict and we do appologize. In order to allow both Jewish and 7th Day Adventist athletes (both of whom can not race after sundown on that Friday) to compete, we have added another high school varsity division. The boys and girls races in that division will start on Friday at 5:00 and 5:30, respectively, just after the JV races. Sundown is not expected until around 7:35.

This additional varsity division will also be beneficial since there was an overflow last year and several varsity teams who did not enter early unfortunately had to be turned away. This year we hope to let everyone in who wants in--but that does not mean the registration deadline can be missed!

Any middle school athletes who have a similiar religious conflict may race a 5K in the JV division, instead of the 2 mile middle school race. Please understand that we recognize the importance of this holiday for this segment of the population and have done our best with these Friday races to make accomodations so that everyone may compete.

We look forward to seeing you all out there at Ed Radice this September 24-25th. All of us are excited about greeting our out of state competitors and then showing them that Floridians don't get beat on their home turf! This year we will have the most fun ever; we will top our 2900+ entries that we had last year; and we will hopefully see new meet records set in the most elite race ever! We may very well see marks of 17:00 5K for girls and 15:00 5K for boys broken for the first time ever on the Ed Radice course! Make sure it's on your team's calendar! Be there!!!

For more information: http://archives.milesplit.com/flrunners/invitational