Imagine how much better they could be

Well Samantha Nadel is going to Georgetown and I think we'll see quite a great career from her. She's been a phenom for years and is running her best as a senior. She has noticeably physically matured and only gotten faster. This huge base will help her when she trains with the Georgetown women and adds in intervals, tempos, etc.

It'll be exciting to Samantha Nadel and Haley Pierce (both of whom are capable of running 4:35 and 9:50 this year) running together for four years with NCAA champion team.

quick question wrote:

no, that's the quality of your team's coaching and practicing. Has nothing to do with how many students are in the school. Cross Country is not a bench sport. You only need 7 people. Approximately the same thing applies to track. Football and basketball are sports that might require depth, but not running.

Galen Rupp would have run just as fast at any high school.

The more people that are at the school, the more people that you can get on the team, and the more people that are good at running.

Hey Einstein wrote:

quick question wrote:

no, that's the quality of your team's coaching and practicing. Has nothing to do with how many students are in the school. Cross Country is not a bench sport. You only need 7 people. Approximately the same thing applies to track. Football and basketball are sports that might require depth, but not running.

Galen Rupp would have run just as fast at any high school.

The more people that are at the school, the more people that you can get on the team, and the more people that are good at running.

a cross country team's roster has never approached the total population of a high school so school size is a non issue

Someone has a very poor grasp of the genetic basis of running ability.

quick question wrote:

a cross country team's roster has never approached the total population of a high school so school size is a non issue

Saugus had 6 girls under the 11-minute barrier for 3,200 meters in 2009, the most girls to ever break 11 from the same high school in the same year.

I also agree, it comes down to the quality of your team's coaching and practicing, not size of school. Look at Saugus and FM for example. They take rookie girls and turn them into state and national champions year after year. It doesn't come down to how many are in your program, it comes down to how well you coach and are the girls willing to put in the work, and Rene and Bill are obviously fantastic coaches with girls that are willing to sacrifice a lot to do so, which is why Saugus will repeat as state champions for the seventh straight year and FM as national champions this year.

Meant doesn't come down to how many are in your school

hhaha simiwwing wrote:

Saugus had 6 girls under the 11-minute barrier for 3,200 meters in 2009, the most girls to ever break 11 from the same high school in the same year.

I also agree, it comes down to the quality of your team's coaching and practicing, not size of school. Look at Saugus and FM for example. They take rookie girls and turn them into state and national champions year after year. It doesn't come down to how many are in your program, it comes down to how well you coach and are the girls willing to put in the work, and Rene and Bill are obviously fantastic coaches with girls that are willing to sacrifice a lot to do so, which is why Saugus will repeat as state champions for the seventh straight year and FM as national champions this year.

I agree that the quality of the coach is more important than the size of the school, but you jokers that keep stating in essence that a big school has no advantages over a small school are smoking some serious crack! Do you know NOTHING about the laws of statistics???

there is no law of statistics.

what exact advantage does a big school have over a small school in cross country? Why wouldn't the same girls that do well in a big school do just as well in a small school? And vice versa?

quick question wrote:

this is your answer wrote:

I agree that the quality of the coach is more important than the size of the school, but you jokers that keep stating in essence that a big school has no advantages over a small school are smoking some serious crack! Do you know NOTHING about the laws of statistics???

there is no law of statistics.

what exact advantage does a big school have over a small school in cross country? Why wouldn't the same girls that do well in a big school do just as well in a small school? And vice versa?

Hopefully you are not trolling. I will assume your question is serious, and try to answer it seriously:

Let's say the average girl, after being trained in a solid program, can run 20 minutes for 5k, with a standard deviation of 30 seconds. A typical bell curve shows that if you have 1000 girls in your school, 340 of them will be capable of running 19:30-20:00, 140 can hit 19:00 to 19:30, and 20 can hit sub 19. The other 500 girls are spread out similarly at times greater than 20 minutes. If 10% of your female student body chooses to run xc (yes, I am ignoring the ability of the coach to recruit, as this is simply an explanation of how two coaches, of equal ability, recruiting skills included, will have two different teams based simply upon the SIZE of their school) then all of those numbers get divided by 10, and you now have 2 sub 19 girls, with 14 more girls at sub 19:30. That's a decent team. But if you double the size of the school, you suddenly have FOUR girls under 19, and you are now competing for a state title. Your coaching skills didn't improve at all ... you simply had a larger number of more talented girls to work with.

Does that make any sense?

i know what you're saying, but it doesn't make any sense. not everything follows some bell curve. and statistics are NOT causal.

please explain Saugus and FM

please explain why the US has not won a distance medal at the Olympics in recent memory even though it has a bigger population/participation

why doesn't every same size school have the same number of runners running the same times?

and on and on

the size of the school has nothing to do with it. it is all about coaching and practice.

You are a morun stuck on either/or. To those with the capacity to reason, it is a matter of competent coaching + a sizable pool of talent. F-M would not be winning national titles if there were only seven girls in the school.

quick question wrote:

i know what you're saying, but it doesn't make any sense. not everything follows some bell curve. and statistics are NOT causal.

please explain Saugus and FM

please explain why the US has not won a distance medal at the Olympics in recent memory even though it has a bigger population/participation

why doesn't every same size school have the same number of runners running the same times?

and on and on

the size of the school has nothing to do with it. it is all about coaching and practice.

mr xxx wrote:

You are a morun stuck on either/or. To those with the capacity to reason, it is a matter of competent coaching + a sizable pool of talent. F-M would not be winning national titles if there were only seven girls in the school.

Why not?

A footlocker team does it every year

Saugus didn't have six girls under 11 minutes in 2009 you moron!

quick question wrote:

i know what you're saying, but it doesn't make any sense. not everything follows some bell curve. and statistics are NOT causal.

please explain Saugus and FM

please explain why the US has not won a distance medal at the Olympics in recent memory even though it has a bigger population/participation

why doesn't every same size school have the same number of runners running the same times?

and on and on

the size of the school has nothing to do with it. it is all about coaching and practice.

Once again, I agree with you that good coaching and a good program with tradition and expectations is more important than school size. FM and Saugus are good primarily because of the great coaches at each of those schools, and the culture of winning that has been created. The bell curves at those schools are skewed to the left (faster times) because of those coaches. Crappy coaches skew their own bell curves to the right, which answers your question as to why same size schools don't get exactly the same results. But if some new housing tract went in that increased the Saugus HS population by 20%, Rene would start averaging 6 girls under 11 for 3200 each year, instead of just 5.

Kenya and Ethiopia and other great running cultures dominate the Olympics because it's a completely different way of life there than here in our sedentary US. If we had kids running to and from school each day like they do, instead of being driven by their parents, their aerobic base would be more similar to the Africans, and I believe we would see similar success.

You truly think school size has NOTHING to do with it? Really?

Let's keep feeding the professional troll.

this is your answer wrote:

But if some new housing tract went in that increased the Saugus HS population by 20%, Rene would start averaging 6 girls under 11 for 3200 each year, instead of just 5.

What do those new +20% students have to do with the pre-existing runners? What are they doing differently that they weren't doing before?

And it's for certain that he'd start averaging more just because some new people enrolled in the school? I really see no sound connection. Can anyone demonstrate this happening with any school's roster?

See if you can wrap your head around this:

Two adjacent high school cross country teams both typically have three guys under 16:00 for 5k. Each team typically does well at the state meet, but neither has ever won. A tornado wipes out one of the high schools. All students from both schools now go to the still standing high school. With 6 guys under 16, they win the state meet the following fall, because their population doubled. Get it now?

Keep feeding. He's hungry tonight.

this is your answer wrote:

See if you can wrap your head around this:

Two adjacent high school cross country teams both typically have three guys under 16:00 for 5k. Each team typically does well at the state meet, but neither has ever won. A tornado wipes out one of the high schools. All students from both schools now go to the still standing high school. With 6 guys under 16, they win the state meet the following fall, because their population doubled. Get it now?

That's what these guys aren't getting. You have more kids to choose from. Statistically there are most likely MORE potentially good runners walking the halls. We had two schools with mediocre teams merge- now, they are a powerhouse. The coach matters- yes- we also have a school double our size no one who could crack our top 5. Their coach has no clue what he's doing- they run like 4 miles a day at 10:00 pace and he thinks that's fast. But, you have MORE to choose from.

Could I have produced 34 sub 5:00 milers at that school? Possibly.