Why wait for the weekend to have a big meet? Invite teams from around the area and compete in the middle of the week.
As a coach, I avoided having my teams compete during the week, and built my schedule around weekend invitationals. When I became the webmaster of NCRunners, I discovered that I had been completely blind to North Carolina's "other" type of invitational: the big weekday meet. There are several of these events on our calendar, and I have tried to get out to at least one every year, so that I can expand my experiences and see what makes them so attractive to large numbers of schools. I've been to the United Way Invitational the last two years, and last fall I also went to the Owen Invitational. This year, I am happy to attend the Statesville Invitational, where I hope to determine the true length of the course for future rankings. It seems that the weekday invitational is primarily a Western North Carolina concept, as most of them are in the left third of the state (or perhaps there are more in the East that just aren't getting added to the calendar). In any case, I've had a lot of fun with these unusual (for me) mid-week events that have big-meet atmospheres. Ranging in size from 10-12 teams up to 30 or more, these meets definitely matter: they produce excellent competition, and many of them are organized around ideas that foster community spirit and support between the teams. Below you will find a sampling of weekday invitationals in North Carolina (I know that there are more, this is not intended to be a comprehensive list):
Ashbrook Luminary Run
Caldwell County Invitational
Statesville Invitational
Owen Invitational
Shelby Invitational
United Way Invitational