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What: Mid-South Conference cross country championships.

When: 4:30 p.m. today.

Where: South View High School

What to watch for: The South View boys and Terry Sanford girls will look to defend their regular-season conference crowns in the first meet of the postseason.

When the Mid-South Conference's boys' and girls' cross country teams gather at South View today, there might be a feeling of deja vu.

The seven schools have gathered five times already this season for conference meets. Area athletic directors implemented the new format this year hoping to place more importance on the regular season like in other high school sports. Instead, coaches have criticized the move and expressed confusion about the scoring system.

"It's horrible," South View coach Jesse Autry said. "It's a horrible system for the sport, and for the kids it's been a disaster."

Before reclassification merged most of the county schools from the Mid-Southeastern and Two Rivers conferences this year, the school would gather each week in groups of two or three at different locations and compete. Most squads, especially conference powers such as South View and Terry Sanford, would treat these meets as workouts, saving themselves for Saturday invitationals.

South View athletic director David Culbreth is in charge of running the sport. He said administrators didn't like coaches holding their best runners out of the conference meets or treating them like training runs. They felt the new rules would end this and create a regular-season championship similar to other sports.

"It sounds good, but you know how things are when you start talking about sport-specific rules," said Culbreth, who has heard complaints from nearly every conference cross country coach. "The cross country guys didn't feel like the rules fit in with the ideology behind cross country.

"I don't know about that, but I've been on the wrestling side of this with rules regarding weight cutting made by people who have no idea about what's involved."

The changes didn't really affect Terry Sanford girls coach Doug Foster's approach. He still treated the Wednesday conference meets as training runs because of fears that too many hard runs would burn his girls out or injure them before the postseason began.

Even with this strategy, the Bulldogs won every conference meet to take the regular-season crown. Autry's boys also won three of the five meets and took seconds in two others to secure the regular-season championship, but he said his runners followed the same approach as the Terry Sanford girls.

"You can't do two hard meets every week of the season," said Foster, whose team was ranked sixth in the state in last week's NCRunners.com coaches poll. "For us, with our training runs on top of racing Saturday, we can't run hard at a Wednesday meet. It's kind of a balance."

Culbreth said Fred McDaniel, student activities director for Cumberland County Schools, plans to examine the rules once the season ends. Culbreth also understands that the lack of communication between the coaches and administration, especially with how the regular-season results would be scored, is part of why contention exists.

Autry said much of the luster has been removed from today's Mid-South championships because of the new rules. Runners usually come to this meet eager to show improvement, but now they probably have a good idea of where they and their respective teams will finish.

"I feel bad because Cape Fear's boys team is on the rise," Autry said. "This is a young team full of freshmen and sophomores and is a team capable of knocking someone else off."