We need your help with this page.
If you have any content, articles or input for this page please email webadmin@metleague.run
How it started
The Metropolitan Cross Country League was formed on 23 March 1966 at a meeting of interested clubs at the Primrose Public House in Bishopsgate, London.
The eight clubs attending were Ealing Harriers (now Ealing, Southall & Middlesex AC), Essex Beagles (now Newham & Essex Beagles AC), Hampstead Harriers (now Barnet & District AC), Highgate Harriers, Ilford AC, Polytechnic Harriers (now Kingston & Polytechnic AC), Thames Valley Harriers and Woodford Green AC (now Woodford Green with Essex Ladies AC). Hillingdon AC was asked to join the League for the first season.
The first fixture of the League was held at Chingford Row/Hainault Forest on 29 October 1966 with over 260 runners competing in the two races.
The Seniors & Juniors race over 5 miles was won by Bob Ellis of Thames Valley Harriers and a 2 ½ mile race for Youths and Boys was won by David Williams of Woodford Green AC. Thames Valley Harriers won the team events in both races and went on to be crowned the inaugural League champions in both age groups. In the initial seasons, four matches were held.
Early Year 1960’s and 1970’s
After the first season in 1966, Hampsted Harriers resigned in 1967 and were replaced by Shaftesbury Harriers (now Shaftesbury Barnet Harriers).
Essex Beagles (now Newham and Essex Beagles) resigned in 1968 but rejoined in 1988. Verlea AC joined in 1969, London Irish AC in 1971, North London AC in 1975 and Borough of Enfield AC in 1976.
In the initial seasons, four matches were held. This was increased to 5 for the 1971 season when a Colt event was also introduced.
In 1979 a Veterans category was added to the league, as an increasing body of veteran runners competed—initial 3 to score.
One of the main interests in the league is that we were the only cross-country league in the Country to score 12 men in the senior/junior race, making each match a ‘glorified mon match’ when all can run whatever their ability with a chance of scoring for their club. We scored 4 in each of the other races.
Howard Williams
Text needed for this section
1980’s to 1990’s
Text needed for this section
2000’s
Text needed for this section
Recent History
In 2015 Janice Bowman stepped in as league administrator covering for Gavin Collett and was officially appointed in April 2016 as the 3rd League Administrator. Major Carr took on the role as treasurer and Paul Holgate took over as results admin.
Jan started to build a new team to deal with the results as well as look at administering the website and social media feeds.
Charlie Bruce took over from Paul in 2018-19, James took over as web admin in 2018-19 and Neil Bowman joined the team in 2019.
James developed a backend online portal, for clubs to register their athletes rather than them filling our paper sheets and submitting these after each race. This was first used for the 2018 season.
This was a cornerstone to improving the results system, as no longer did the result team need to spend hours manually entering runners into the results systems. The runners were downloaded from the portal and imported into the Excel sheets.
The league also added a barcode to the numbers and started scanning these at the end of the finish funnel, in addition to writing them down.