J.R. wrote:
watchout wrote:Participation numbers at the Nike and Foot Locker meets for NCAA Top-100 finishers this year is VERY similar over the last four years.
Boys -
2012 NXN: 0/2
2012 NXR: 1/2
2012 FLN: 2/2
2012 FLR: 2/2
What are the numbers referring to? 0/2 = 0 of 2?
This is not a good comparison, unless I'm misunderstanding how you got the results, because NxN has ten times the runners.
If you took the top 400 runners from the Footlocker Regionals, then they would have more in the top 100 at NCAA.
0/2 in that case means that 0 of the NCAA Top-100 Mens finishers competed at the NXN National meet while there were 2 men that were in high school at that time.
1/2 in that case means that 1 of the NCAA Top-100 Mens finishers competed at the NXN Regional meets while there were 2 men that were in high school at that time.
(etc.)
There is no part of the post analyzing how highly the runners finished in the races, just whether they competed in the meets.
I agree, it's not a great comparison, but mostly due to the reason that these athletes have completely different training (or, at the very least, more years of training) than they had in high school, so it's not a great representation of how good the kids were in high school (I've made posts in the past on Dyestat regarding how the top X athletes ran in track, specifically focusing on 3200m/2 mile marks, which shows the meets are pretty similar - top-10 in the US is pretty well split, but NXN is deeper - probably because of having more kids in the race; the balance certainly isn't significantly one way or another in most cases, although I think the girls have been pretty heavily tilted towards NXN this year and last due to the runners at the top - Baxter, Cain (though not this year), Efraimson, Cranny, Neale, Knight, Hauger (the only one of the above who ran both), etc.).
Once again, the reason I posted those statistics is because people were asking about such statistics. It was not my intention to promote a viewpoint one way or the other, just post the findings and point out that the meets seem similar in the analysis that was asked for.