I'm surprised to see some of these speed ratings as high as they are. Only a handful of girls were under 18 minutes. Is this a particularly tough 3 mile course?
Bethlehem is #1 in the Dyestat rankings too. Now this is getting out of hand. Does no one follow this sport closely on a national level anymore? Or do they in some way shape or form use the Milesplit rankings as a reference?
While it's no southwest, the northwest is looking uncharacteristically strong on the girls side of things, Idaho is particular might just be the most competitive state for girls right now aside from California/Colorado/Utah.
I can't think of the last time the NW got an at-large on the girls side, certainly not since covid, but I honestly wouldn't put it out of the question.
Boise got 2nd at Firman (beating several decent teams including the 2nd best Cali team - JSerra, which only got 7th), then went on to beat Lincoln OR (a preseason favorite) on their home course at Rose City.
Timberline beat the most historically dominant program in the Northwest in Jesuit at THEIR home course at Nike Twilight.
Capital (Idaho), a team I've never heard of before, went to Nike Portland and beat a lot of legit Oregon and Washington teams.
Then Rocky Mountain, coming off of only 3rd at Bob Firman, (still ahead of JSerra) comes in at districts and beats all the above teams, and by a decent margin too.
Rocky 51
Capital 86
Timberline 89
Boise 90
It also says something about the southwest that Green Canyon, the team that won Bob Firman, only ended up getting 2nd in the 4A state meet, but still, the Northwest looks really really good.
Bethlehem is #1 in the Dyestat rankings too. Now this is getting out of hand. Does no one follow this sport closely on a national level anymore? Or do they in some way shape or form use the Milesplit rankings as a reference?
Why do people refuse to believe that any team besides a Colorado or California team can be #1? New York had dominated HS XC for decades, and there is a lot of data on historically dominant teams like FM and Saratoga from previous years that can be used to compare to Bethlehem now, especially Saratoga because they’re in the same section and run the same courses. And Mountain Vista hasn’t looked good recently. They are vulnerable and so is Air Academy.
Bethlehem is #1 in the Dyestat rankings too. Now this is getting out of hand. Does no one follow this sport closely on a national level anymore? Or do they in some way shape or form use the Milesplit rankings as a reference?
Why do people refuse to believe that any team besides a Colorado or California team can be #1? New York had dominated HS XC for decades, and there is a lot of data on historically dominant teams like FM and Saratoga from previous years that can be used to compare to Bethlehem now, especially Saratoga because they’re in the same section and run the same courses. And Mountain Vista hasn’t looked good recently. They are vulnerable and so is Air Academy.
Nobody is "refusing" any other state. We're just REFUTIING this particular horribly biased logic behind supporting the #49 team in the country (on paper) being given the current #1 ranking, while they happen to be from the same state as the "journalist".
It's just a blatantly biased statement that every team he ranked below them (which is every team in the top 48) is shaking their head about.
Why do people refuse to believe that any team besides a Colorado or California team can be #1? New York had dominated HS XC for decades, and there is a lot of data on historically dominant teams like FM and Saratoga from previous years that can be used to compare to Bethlehem now, especially Saratoga because they’re in the same section and run the same courses. And Mountain Vista hasn’t looked good recently. They are vulnerable and so is Air Academy.
Nobody is "refusing" any other state. We're just REFUTIING this particular horribly biased logic behind supporting the #49 team in the country (on paper) being given the current #1 ranking, while they happen to be from the same state as the "journalist".
It's just a blatantly biased statement that every team he ranked below them (which is every team in the top 48) is shaking their head about.
Do you know ANYTHING about cross country? The times are practically irrelevant unless you’re comparing two athletes on the same course. California kids run on pancake flat soccer fields and perfectly packed dirt and the Colorado kids ran a literal road race that’s viewed as legitimate because it’s at elevation. Have them run at Bowdoin Park and they will crumble. Wait until NXR and NXN and we will see who is right.
Did you really call NXN a “VERY hard course” just now? That tells me everything I need to know about your perception of XC courses and their difficulty.
It’s like I said before, CO has a good year and suddenly everyone forgot that NY girls have won 15 out of the 18 NTN/NXN races ever contested.
Everyone really needs to tone down the Bethlehem hate on this thread though. The meets/courses they’ve run this year (Bowdoin Park, Manhattan, SPAC) are all historic courses in NY with lots of prior national championship winning teams having run on them. Before you come on again and make another post hating on Bethlehem do some actual research and go look at how their times on those courses compare to prior FM/Saratoga teams that have won NXN (usually by a lot) in the past.
If you’re too lazy for that then I’ll at least get you started. Bethlehem’s most recent race which seemed to move them up to #1 was their league championship at SPAC (Saratoga’s home course), where they ran 17:41. Last year when they finished 11th at NXN they ran 18:10 at the same meet under similar conditions. Running 29 seconds per runner faster at NXN wouldn’t have put them over the top of the top 2 but they’d certainly have been looking at a podium finish. When Saratoga won NXN in 2019 and 2022 they ran 17:32-17:33 at SPAC. Once again this is Saratoga’s home course! They literally train on it year round since it’s a few minutes from their high school and they typically have some of their best races of the year on this course and Bethlehem was within a 10 second per runner average of two national championship winning teams. In 2019 only one team was within 20 seconds of Saratoga at NXN, in 2022 the only teams within 10 seconds of Saratoga finished 2nd-4th.
So given that context and now that you know Bethlehems performance last weekend puts them in the company of previous national championship/podium caliber teams, please share your side of things. And don’t just give me random 3 mile/5k times with no context. Tell me how the top teams in CO this year compare to the times run by the top CO teams from last year on the same courses, as well as 2019 and 2022 when they all lost to Saratoga. Unless you can tell me they’re all substantially better then any notion that Bethlehem is not a podium contender this year needs to be put to bed.
To be clear I’m still not in any way saying Bethlehem is #1 or will win NXN, but it’s not as insane as people are making it out to be, claiming that they’re barely a top 50 team in the country and they’re getting moved up 49 spots based purely on bias. It’s based on pretty good knowledge of what their times on these courses usually mean for a team against national caliber competition.
Did you really call NXN a “VERY hard course” just now? That tells me everything I need to know about your perception of XC courses and their difficulty.
It’s like I said before, CO has a good year and suddenly everyone forgot that NY girls have won 15 out of the 18 NTN/NXN races ever contested.
Everyone really needs to tone down the Bethlehem hate on this thread though. The meets/courses they’ve run this year (Bowdoin Park, Manhattan, SPAC) are all historic courses in NY with lots of prior national championship winning teams having run on them. Before you come on again and make another post hating on Bethlehem do some actual research and go look at how their times on those courses compare to prior FM/Saratoga teams that have won NXN (usually by a lot) in the past.
If you’re too lazy for that then I’ll at least get you started. Bethlehem’s most recent race which seemed to move them up to #1 was their league championship at SPAC (Saratoga’s home course), where they ran 17:41. Last year when they finished 11th at NXN they ran 18:10 at the same meet under similar conditions. Running 29 seconds per runner faster at NXN wouldn’t have put them over the top of the top 2 but they’d certainly have been looking at a podium finish. When Saratoga won NXN in 2019 and 2022 they ran 17:32-17:33 at SPAC. Once again this is Saratoga’s home course! They literally train on it year round since it’s a few minutes from their high school and they typically have some of their best races of the year on this course and Bethlehem was within a 10 second per runner average of two national championship winning teams. In 2019 only one team was within 20 seconds of Saratoga at NXN, in 2022 the only teams within 10 seconds of Saratoga finished 2nd-4th.
So given that context and now that you know Bethlehems performance last weekend puts them in the company of previous national championship/podium caliber teams, please share your side of things. And don’t just give me random 3 mile/5k times with no context. Tell me how the top teams in CO this year compare to the times run by the top CO teams from last year on the same courses, as well as 2019 and 2022 when they all lost to Saratoga. Unless you can tell me they’re all substantially better then any notion that Bethlehem is not a podium contender this year needs to be put to bed.
To be clear I’m still not in any way saying Bethlehem is #1 or will win NXN, but it’s not as insane as people are making it out to be, claiming that they’re barely a top 50 team in the country and they’re getting moved up 49 spots based purely on bias. It’s based on pretty good knowledge of what their times on these courses usually mean for a team against national caliber competition.
Thank you. This is a great, well written post that represents my thoughts clearly.
Did you really call NXN a “VERY hard course” just now? That tells me everything I need to know about your perception of XC courses and their difficulty.
It’s like I said before, CO has a good year and suddenly everyone forgot that NY girls have won 15 out of the 18 NTN/NXN races ever contested.
Everyone really needs to tone down the Bethlehem hate on this thread though. The meets/courses they’ve run this year (Bowdoin Park, Manhattan, SPAC) are all historic courses in NY with lots of prior national championship winning teams having run on them. Before you come on again and make another post hating on Bethlehem do some actual research and go look at how their times on those courses compare to prior FM/Saratoga teams that have won NXN (usually by a lot) in the past.
If you’re too lazy for that then I’ll at least get you started. Bethlehem’s most recent race which seemed to move them up to #1 was their league championship at SPAC (Saratoga’s home course), where they ran 17:41. Last year when they finished 11th at NXN they ran 18:10 at the same meet under similar conditions. Running 29 seconds per runner faster at NXN wouldn’t have put them over the top of the top 2 but they’d certainly have been looking at a podium finish. When Saratoga won NXN in 2019 and 2022 they ran 17:32-17:33 at SPAC. Once again this is Saratoga’s home course! They literally train on it year round since it’s a few minutes from their high school and they typically have some of their best races of the year on this course and Bethlehem was within a 10 second per runner average of two national championship winning teams. In 2019 only one team was within 20 seconds of Saratoga at NXN, in 2022 the only teams within 10 seconds of Saratoga finished 2nd-4th.
So given that context and now that you know Bethlehems performance last weekend puts them in the company of previous national championship/podium caliber teams, please share your side of things. And don’t just give me random 3 mile/5k times with no context. Tell me how the top teams in CO this year compare to the times run by the top CO teams from last year on the same courses, as well as 2019 and 2022 when they all lost to Saratoga. Unless you can tell me they’re all substantially better then any notion that Bethlehem is not a podium contender this year needs to be put to bed.
To be clear I’m still not in any way saying Bethlehem is #1 or will win NXN, but it’s not as insane as people are making it out to be, claiming that they’re barely a top 50 team in the country and they’re getting moved up 49 spots based purely on bias. It’s based on pretty good knowledge of what their times on these courses usually mean for a team against national caliber competition.
Thanks for the thoughtful response to support the rankings...but it only proves the bias, Kyle.
If you do research with a mindframe of supporting your own hypothesis, that's exactly what you're going to do. Your bias pushed you to dig into that level of detail for only one region, and narrowed your defense for one team, while ignoring the accomplishments of the rest of the teams nearby in the rankings.
Nothing you presented in (your) article, nor your post above has anything to do with the times of any of the other teams who are more deserving of top ranking. Myopic tunnel vision does nothing to sway public opinion away from a perception of a clear bias that cost you some credibility. Props for sticking your neck out to support a team that came out of nowhere, who happens to be from your home state, but it still doesn't make nearly enough sense to the rest of the country.
Not the original poster, but I mean they did finish 11th last year at nxn, and brought back all but 1 runner I think, so I wouldn’t say they came out of nowhere…
if you’re using milesplit 5k time rankings to judge the best teams, that’s a tough one to defend…
Courses around the country are vastly different, and an 19min avg at one course may very well be equal to an 18min avg on a different course. Its common knowledge of how xc works…
MV I still think is the favorite, but both dyestat and milesplit do a decent job of explaining their rankings and why they think BC is ranked 1 with a chance to win.
Still waiting for you to provide the comparison on other regions…how do the CO teams this year and their times compare to those run by CO teams from the last 4-5 years? How about the Cali teams? Or any other region you claim is being screwed over by these rankings? I can do it for you if you don’t know how to look up results from prior years and do simple math.
Please provide any data point other than straight 3m/5k times to support the idea that there are close to 50 teams out there better than a team that finished just outside the top 10 last year and by any objective measure has improved considerably since then.
Here’s another ask I’ll throw out there that I know you won’t actually follow up on. Please look up the top 10 teams in the country based on the top 3m/5k times for each of the last 5 years or so. Then go ahead and compare that to the top 10 finishers at NXN in each of those years. Based on how you think rankings should be done those lists should be pretty close right? Basically a one-to-one match?
This argument is honestly pointless now because you’ve had your chance to provide some real data and you didn’t, you completed avoided the asks I made, and made a completely false assumption about who I am. Based on your rudimentary understanding of XC I can already guess that you’re a young high schooler that has probably only been following high school XC for a year or two and you are clearly from some school in CO that is probably not that high at all in the rankings which is why you’re so pissy about them.
Until you provide some real rationale I won’t be responding again until after NXN. If you’re right and Bethlehem along with any other NY girls teams that make it finish dead last which is what you seem to believe will happen then I will happily congratulate you. If on the other hand they finish well then I hope you’ll take all this as a wake up call that you need to do a bit more research about this sport before posting in the future.
One last note I’ll make, if the rankings are so biased for NY then why is it only on the girls side? Shouldn’t the same bias apply on the boys side? NY boys are atrocious this year just like last year and probably will end up with similar NXN places to last year, something deeply disappointing to me but it’s not like Milesplit or Dyestat are just blatantly ignoring that. Dyestat doesn’t have a single boys team from NY in the top 30 and doesn’t have any team from the rest of the NE besides CBA in any type of respectable position. Am I to believe this bias only applies to the girls? Seems a bit weird but I’m sure you’ll ignore this last point as well and deflect again.