XC is about racing, there is enough time chasing in the spring
XC is about racing, there is enough time chasing in the spring
obviously no perfect answer, but I think the best reason to keep it the same is to encourage racing throughout the pack. Knowing you have to pass a guy rather than just keep close is what makes it a sport.
The problem of a weak 5th man deciding the race - well, tough patooties.
I don't think all meets have to follow the same rules.
For example there is a meet around me that adds the boys and girl's scores together for a school award.
Seems like any meet can do what ever it wants as long as the other teams know before the race. Then during championship time state rules apply.
I think if you had an extremely fast course then adding time awards would be an incentive for front runners to push the pace more. Thus fulfilling the reputation of a fast course. The meet might gain popularity, because everyone likes a PR.
I'm all for mixing it up during the season, but wouldn't want to change the scoring for championship races due to the tradition of the sport. Imagine if baseball made home runs worth 2 runs or you get a bonus base for hitting the 1st pitch. Make things more interesting, sure, but I think you have to keep the sport consistent.
Skip Donohue wrote:
Wow, you're pretty good if you can add up all the other teams scores as well as your own and then calculate how many runners an individual has to pass to win the team prize.
How much time does this leave you to watch the race?
Really? I thought that everyone did this. You mean that some people find this difficult? If so I can't imagine why.
It's to make it more "team-oriented." The difference in time per place is much greater at the top, so this system relatively increases the importance of the 4th and 5th runners. I agree time would be better because the faster kids should count at least as much(or more) but certainly not less.
Part of the drama of cross country is waiting on the last runner to come in on a particular team. Typically the team that gets its top five across the line first wins (not always).
There is already additional additional recognition of the top runners (i.e. individual champions).
Cross Country is about team work and running with your team mates in races. The good pack schools know this.
I think the reason is historical - in the past there weren't necessarily accurate timers, but you could always figure out the places reliably.
I think it should stay that way though. Race for place, not time. It would be interesting to see how differently the strategies play out though.
In USATF championships (adult & masters) total time for teams is used for scoring purposes. Particularly in masters when there can be fewer teams in an age group with a wide disparity of times, this is the most fair way to go. when first place wins by 2 or more minutes, first place deserves more then just one point.
sub16? wrote:
Wow … You are joking, right? Friday Night Lights is an awesome television series. The movie was decent, but certainly not on the same level as the show. You have no credibility.
LOL. So wrong.
Interesting question. For all the talk about cross country being a team sport, it's interesting that the relative performance of a strong #1 runner is almost irrelevant. If you've got a 14:x kid in high school, he can be twenty seconds off and still only cost a couple of points. Your #5 guy can be off by twenty seconds and cost fifty points.
In track, the performance of your mediocre runners is essentially irrelevant at big meets. They're not scoring points no matter how they do. In cross, the performance of your best athletes (if you have them) is almost irrelevant.
Personally, I like the contrast; cross is more communist/communal, and track is more capitalist and cutthroat, with the top 1% battling it out and carrying their teams.
However, I do think there would be interesting spectacles in timed cross races: you'd know that every tenth of a second for every runner could potentially be the difference-maker, and you'd see people really pushing themselves to their limits.
I feel like switching to a time basis would lead to a change in team tactics. If you can keep your team pack time down it would put you in an advantage. My team this year has routinely been beaten by a team that goes 27,27,29,30,33 while we go 27,28,28,28,28. The points their top guy saved puts us at a disadvantage because the last 5 points handed out usually range between 10 minutes at bigger meets. I think average team time should be the scoring basis as it actually represents the true "score" of the team
No matter what scoring system you use, different team profiles will do better in different kinds of races. I really think team scoring best represents the best team effort 1-5. It's not very common, in a district, state etc. type meet that you're going to have someone like Baxter win by an extremely large margin. Place scoring makes racing more important. A team's 3-5 type runners could watch 10 guys blow by in the last 200m and not really have any impact on their team time. That's not how I want meet scoring to work.
I think a focus on team time is also dependent on what state you're in. I see California teams/coaches/fans mentioning team time frequently, whereas here in Oregon, I have never once heard any team reference their total team time.
Best arguments so far have been:
- There are already individual honors, basing it on time would just skew things more toward the individual. Keep it based on place so that it rewards the deeper team, not the top heavy team.
- Time doesn't matter in cross country. How true. We run through mud, over hills. We run odd distances. XC times often meaningless. The place scoring system goes nicely with that fact.
This is how we reported team scores in New England USATF last year with place and time and average time so you could imagine a team being one person and see how far apart they would be, but place score is what would have counted if there had been a disparity. If you have the technology, why not report it this way?
Rank Team Total 1 2 3 4 5 *6 *7
=======================================================================
1 Boston Athletic Assn 20 1 2 3 6 8 10 14
Total Time: 2:34:39.00
Average: 30:55.80
2 New Balance Boston 44 4 7 9 11 13 17 20
Total Time: 2:38:03.00
Average: 31:36.60
3 Green Mountain Athletic A 89 5 15 16 26 27 38
Total Time: 2:42:34.00
Average: 32:30.80
4 Greater Boston Track Club 123 19 22 24 28 30 32 33
Total Time: 2:46:42.01
Average: 33:20.40
5 Hfc Striders 132 21 23 25 29 34 35 36
Total Time: 2:47:49.01
Average: 33:33.80
6 Dirigo R.C. 137 12 18 31 37 39
Total Time: 2:50:28.01
Average: 34:05.60
XC (and Track) are about RACING. If you have your#1 beat their #1 by a second, and similarly for numbers 2-4, and their #5 beats your #5 by 10 seconds, do you really think that best team wins? Beating people counts. Beating people by a lot counts when there are many people in the race so that when you beat someone, not only do they score more than you but they score more than all those between the two of you (which is the really important element). Thus, point scoring brings in the degree of beating in a competitive way, while time leads to zero relevance.
Of course, time also ignore the #6/7 runners.
Here are the women's teams from Wisconsin adidas Invite. Note that there are a number of cases where you cannot get the order to be 'correct' without having the time to either the tenth or hundredth of a second.
1 109 1:40:11 Iowa State
2 181 1:40:56 0:00:45 Stanford
3 242 1:41:54 0:00:58 Arizona
6 265 1:41:59 0:00:05 Providence
5 264 1:42:08 0:00:09 Cornell
4 252 1:42:17 0:00:09 Washington
7 364 1:42:50 0:00:33 Duke
10 439 1:42:54 0:00:04 Weber State
9 420 1:43:16 0:00:22 Michigan State
8 383 1:43:21 0:00:05 Penn State
11 457 1:43:21 0:00:00 New Mexico
19 510 1:43:44 0:00:23 Connecticut
13 469 1:43:47 0:00:03 Yale
13 469 1:43:48 0:00:01 Toledo
18 489 1:43:48 0:00:00 Vanderbilt
15 472 1:43:49 0:00:01 UCLA
12 468 1:43:50 0:00:01 Notre Dame
16 482 1:43:51 0:00:01 Boston College
16 482 1:43:52 0:00:01 Minnesota
20 531 1:44:10 0:00:18 San Francisco
21 551 1:44:15 0:00:05 North Carolina St.
22 595 1:44:18 0:00:03 Syracuse
24 620 1:44:40 0:00:22 BYU
23 608 1:44:45 0:00:05 Harvard
25 626 1:44:49 0:00:04 Princeton
26 627 1:44:51 0:00:02 Brown
27 652 1:44:51 0:00:00 Northwestern
32 755 1:44:56 0:00:05 Cal Poly
28 707 1:44:59 0:00:03 North Carolina
31 735 1:45:01 0:00:02 Arizona State
30 726 1:45:12 0:00:11 Wisconsin
29 719 1:45:20 0:00:08 Georgia
33 785 1:45:43 0:00:23 Ohio State
34 791 1:45:43 0:00:00 Colorado St.
35 809 1:45:48 0:00:05 Indiana
36 826 1:45:55 0:00:07 Columbia
37 864 1:46:04 0:00:09 Iowa
38 881 1:46:22 0:00:18 Northern Arizona
39 944 1:46:37 0:00:15 La Salle
40 946 1:46:48 0:00:11 Virginia
42 1001 1:46:53 0:00:05 California
41 962 1:47:17 0:00:24 Iona
43 1065 1:47:39 0:00:22 Missouri
45 1102 1:47:42 0:00:03 Purdue
44 1078 1:47:57 0:00:15 Dartmouth
46 1155 1:48:13 0:00:16 Texas A&M
47 1192 1:48:26 0:00:13 Kansas
48 1405 1:50:58 0:02:32 Nebraska
This guy, he has it right. Cross country is meant to have a distance (hell, it doesn't even matter what the distance is to some degree), with time irrelevant. The runners compete by running against the competition over the given topography of the course. Pure, competition-oriented racing at it's most basic. Cross country is, and should be, about beating the other guy over the course, not about the time that it took you to do so.
i mean this in all honesty wrote:
Best arguments so far have been:
- There are already individual honors, basing it on time would just skew things more toward the individual. Keep it based on place so that it rewards the deeper team, not the top heavy team.
- Time doesn't matter in cross country. How true. We run through mud, over hills. We run odd distances. XC times often meaningless. The place scoring system goes nicely with that fact.
Given I only read the first page, but where are the people who appreciate the intricacies of cross country? There are huge differences between dual meets and a meet like Wisconsin, and subtle but significant difference all the way in between. Different types of teams are better suited to different types of racing. If it were about times, it wouldn't matter what the field were like any given day. It wouldn't matter figuring out who needs to beat who to have a chance in a dual, etc. For instance, I think it's awesome that if you go 1-2-3 in a dual, you can't lose. That is what cross country is. It's not the same every time.
hayward102 wrote:
I think a focus on team time is also dependent on what state you're in. I see California teams/coaches/fans mentioning team time frequently, whereas here in Oregon, I have never once heard any team reference their total team time.
In Oregon you can see the differences in this argument by looking at Jesuit and South Eugene girls teams. Jesuit will likely win the state title with no runners in the top-10 where South Eugene has two of the best runners to come along in a generation along with a fair supporting cast.
Which school should be rewarded as the best team?. The scoring will be close and Jesuit will probably win but I think South Eugene is the most talented top-to-bottom.
Grant is also a close comparison. They'll have three in the top 10 or better with the next two further back. I also couldn't look at Jesuit and say they are better as a team than Grant.
haven't read the whole thread...
you could get fancy and do a weighted average of total time and team score. that way they both come into play.
WRONG!!!