Milesplit misses so many crucial points regarding data

You seem to know a lot about this, so I nominate you to develop something better.

Annnnnnnnnd..... GO!

I agree they have a lot of data, most of which they misuse. The celebrations of a new top time for a 1600 when there are 1 mile, or converted 1500 times already much faster seem out of place to me as well.

Aside from anything else, it does seem like It should be relatively simple to generate and put out rankings that do some combination of distance conversions (e.g. combine 3200, 3000, and 2 mile). They could also do altitude conversions with a little more work to input meet location altitudes.

Seems like that would be meat and potatoes value for a site like Milesplit.

Around 2013 ish (I was leaving hs and entering college) they started slowly putting everything behind their paywall, Milesplit Pro. 95% of their sight is now blurred out or unnavailable.

At that time, I emailed the webmaster for my state and basically said, the very little data I can see is inaccurate and incomplete (ex. The top 1600m guy was clearly an errant JV 800 time of 3:05). Completely unjustifiable to charge money to see this stuff. He replied that they were working on it and claimed that their big problem was that people didn't send their results to them. I thought that was insane that a wannabe aggregator site thought people should send them stuff, consistently, for free. I knew the website would get crappier, so I grabbed all my hs results off of it. No surprise, all that info is now also behind the paywall.

So yeah Milesplit really really sucks.

The concept of being complete is brought up over and over again and there's a number of reasons why the concept is nearly impossible. First and foremost there's no uniformity. There is no national governing association who is requiring that results be reported, there is in 95% of states no state organization that is requiring results to be reported, and when those asks aren't being made from the top there is no standard for how coaches run their meets and for how they record their results.

What's going to stop the coach who runs a meet at a barn in Indiana from having all of his assistant coaches handwrite every mark that takes place at his event or maybe just write first initial and last name for each athlete thus making it very difficult to tie each athlete with their performance?

Sites like MileSplit and A-Net have done a lot to usher in some sort of uniformity and advancement to the sport by requiring specific formats but unfortunately that's a slow process that is being pushed by two organizations who don't really have any authority.

They put their data behind a paywall because they are still aggregating everything that is out there, that they receive or that they can find. If the community wants better data, then there needs to be some unified push to get xc/track to a place where results are reported like box scores are in football/basketball/baseball etc.

If the community wants better live streams, then they need to support companies that invest money into producing events.

Instead, we'll just get people who will complain about bad streams, get excited about the new guys on the block that blow a bunch of money and think they've figured it out only to flame out later, suggest that ad revenue can support a model despite the fact that ad revenue isn't significant in 2021 (especially for events that will garner little viewing when compared with any major sport), and ultimately blame the failure and lack of popularity/money in the sport on the fact that there isn't enough exposure.

Newsflash... everyone knows what track and field and cross country is.... but even many of the diehards don't like it enough to pay much for it and invest in models that want to invest in the sport. All in all it's much easier to retweet and virtue signal with talking heads like Chris Chavez who advocate for free everything while simultaneously dooming the professional athletes he covers to continue to sustain on three pairs of nikes, a roll of nickels and a pack of bodyglides as compensation for hitting an olympic standard.

inccstats.com

Legendary website, if someone could do a similar thing for national (and state by state) data it would be incredible.

Plus for years people were feeding them fake results just to mess with them. Many of those results are still in there.

Milesplit varies in quality by state.

Results in Ohio (at least when my kids were running in Ohio) were pristine.

Regarding cross country times, you just have to take all cross country times with a grain of salt. Even on a course that is typical and no one usually has an issue with it, all it takes is for someone to put a cone in the wrong place, and suddenly after three laps cutting it short, it's now 100+ meters short.

As someone else suggested. go create something better.