A Look Back

By Jarrett Felix

So recently, I was curious about a couple things and I took a look back at the last 10 state championships for indoor track and field. All have been contested at Penn State and all have had fairly similar rules (with the exception of the two relay rule in 2016). Plus, the general attitude around indoor, while steadily evolving, didn’t make a massive jump during this period. And, of course, 10 years is a nice round number to work with. Here’s a look at some of my personal favorite findings.

Sophomore Individual State Medalists

There have been just 9 sophomores over the past 10 years who have broken into the top 8 in their respective state championship event. That doesn’t feel like all the much. Over the same 10-year span in Cross Country we have had 22 AAA state medalists that came from the sophomore class. But track’s a different beast and only a very select group of runners have managed to spring free and grab hardware. Here’s your list:

Josh Hoey, DT West	2nd	Mile	2016
Jake Brophy, CB East	3rd	3k	2014
Jax Hoey, Malvern Prep	4th	Mile	2014
Dustin Wilson, Chesnut Hill	6th	3k	2010
TJ Hobart, Baldwin	7th	Mile	2007
Kevin James, O'Hara	7th	Mile	2013
Tristan Forsythe, Winchester Thurston	7th	Mile	2016
Tom Mallon, CBS	8th	800m	2008
John Lewis, Cheltenham	8th	800m	2013

If you take a look at those names, you can see some all-timers. If you exclude Josh Hoey and Tristan Forsythe (still in high school right now) and consider only the 7 names remaining, 5 of them won individual state championships their senior indoor season. As for the other two? Well, one fell in a slow state final that he arguably was the favorite in while the other ran had to settle for silver despite running a time that would have been a state record any other year. Oh, and that same guy still finished his senior indoor season with a state gold, anchoring his DMR to a state championship.

So we are talking very elite stuff. It will be interesting to see if any of our young sophomores climbing the rankings right now can sneak onto the medal stand. And it also should a warning to those entering into a prediction contest that you have to proceed with caution when betting on a sophomore.

Average Times of Winner, 8^th Place

I took a look at some of the time discrepancies over the year for the winners and the last medalists over the past 10 years. The results are summarized in a table below.

Fastest, Slowest, Average	Winner			8th
	Fastest	Slowest	Average	Fastest	Slowest	Average
800m	1:50.55 (14)	1:54.62 (08)	1:52.50	1:55.15 (15)	1:57.11 (14)	1:56.63
Mile	4:09.56 (15)	4:21.19 (09)	4:15.19	4:20.41 (14)	4:27.09 (08)	4:23.58
3000m	8:26.21 (07)	8:39.41 (12)	8:33.26	8:42.63 (13)	9:11.95 (07)	8:54.83
4x800m	7:45.06 (11)	7:56.71 (07)	7:50.50	8:02.05 (16)	8:10.74 (08)	8:06.92
DMR	10:15.89 (08)	10:28.02 (11)	10:22.06	10:35.20 (11)	10:55.15 (09)	10:43.16

You’ll notice that, on average, it has taken about a 1:52.5, 4:15.19 and 8:33.26 to win the state championship in each of the individual events. The relays are down closer to 7:50.50 and 10:22.06, however, both of those times could be influenced going forward by the new schedule and the new relay rules. For example, the 2016 4x8 was very quick across the board, including the fastest 3^rd, 4^th, 7^th and 8^th place finishers of the decade. Meanwhile the DMR, while having a nice amount of depth, was the second slowest winning time in meet history.

The fastest and slowest winning teams seem fairly scattered, but if you take a look at the 8^th place times, it seems the races are trending faster. The toughest medal years in all the distance events have come this decade. In fact, only the DMR is outside the past five seasons.

The outdoor state qualifying standards in AAA are roughly 1:57, 4:24, 9:31, 8:01 in the 800, 1600, 3200 and 4x8 respectively. So the difference between these standards and the average 8^th place finish is roughly -0.5 seconds, -2 seconds, +3 seconds, and +5 seconds. Assuming that those state qualifying standards are all roughly equivalent in value, the hardest event to medal in would actually be the mile. Ironically, this is the event that I thought would be hurt the most by the two relay rule. Maybe 2017 and beyond will change things, but 2016 was right in line with this average.

This other little fact is obvious, but I suppose it’s worth mentioning anyway: fast races produce fast results. In 2015, we had the second fastest 800 time in state history as John Lewis won the title in 1:50.57. The 2015 800 produced the fastest 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th, 5^th, 6^th, 7^th and 8^th place finishers in meet history. The race also produced the 2^nd, 3^rd, 6^th, and 12^th fastest times in overall meet history. In 2013, when Tony Russell boldly took out the pace, it had a similar effect. Up until last season, the 2013 race (won by Max Norris in the 2^nd fastest state meet time in the past 10 years) had produced the best per place times for 2^rd through 10^th (excluding 3^rd). In 2016, we saw the fastest per place times for 2^nd through 4^th from Hockenbury, Henderson and Kirshenbaum.

Cutting the # of Entries Per Event Creates Slower Times?

Well, this one is also pretty obvious, but I’ll outline the case anyway. When a field restricts its entrants, it’s natural that the depth is going to fall off. But the depth doesn’t just hit 12^th through 15^th, it can go all the way up to the top 5 spots overall. Let’s take a look at the events where this can hit hardest: 3k, DMR and 4x8 (mile and 800 have at least 2 heats every year so this is basically a non-issue for them).

In the 3k, let’s make the cut off for a “big” year 15 entrants and compare this to the “small” years. In small years, 8^th place averaged 8:58.75. In big years, the same spot averaged 8:48.96. In fact, in those same big years, 12^th place averaged 8:55.32, over 3 seconds faster than 8^th place in the small years. In the 6 small years, there were 15 top 12 finishers above 9 minutes, compared to 0 in the 4 big years. Similarly, there were 30 sub 8:50 runners in the big years compared to 29 in the small years. This comes despite the fact that 1) There are 33% more small years than big years and 2) Our two most recent years were small years.

The 2013 state 3k sticks out in my memory. They loaded 20 guys into one heat and it produced the deepest indoor 3k race in state history (see above). That gave us 9 of the sub 8:50 marks referenced previously.

In the DMR, for the first 4 years of the meet, the event was limited to only the top 10 teams. In 2011, they opened up the meet to 13 teams. As a result, even though 2011 was the slowest winning time to date, we saw the fastest results to date for places 5 through 10. The 4x8 hasn’t been hit too hard, at least at the top. Places 9 through 12 have dipped in quality, but the top 5-6 finishers haven’t really changed much. 2016, of course, was very fast at the top with a very small amount of teams. However, it did 1) come first in the meet for the first time and 2) allow teams who otherwise may have focused on the DMR to enter both relays. 2008 was one of the slowest years for the 4x8 outside the top 2-3 teams and also had one of the smallest field sizes. However, this is a sample size of one and not much of evidence of any trends.

The big complicating factor in this analysis is that, before 2015 and 2016, the only years where we would have “big” fields in the 4x8 and 3k were the years when a ton of people hit the qualifying time. So of course those races would be better. More people ran fast in the regular season, so more people would run faster at states. There is a correlation in effect here.

But I will say this, some of the slowest qualifiers in year’s past have made big jumps into the medals at states. Seth Slavin and Henry Sappey just snuck into states in 2016 and both guys ended up in the medals at 6^th and 7^th overall. CR North was the 12^th qualifier in the 4x8, but they finished in the medals as well. Seneca Valley was the last team into states for the DMR a year ago (#14), but finished 4^th overall in the event.

If you had made the cut off 12 guys in year’s past, runners like Chris Aldrich (4^th), Jimmy Tarsnane (9^th), Chuck Lockwood (5^th), Reece Ayers (7^th), and Tyler Mueller (8^th) may have been shut out of the meet for the 3,000.

No Back to Back State Champs Individually, 2 Relays Repeat

This is pretty wild to me as well. Since North Penn won back to back 4x8s in 2007-2008 we’ve seen just one repeat: a stunner last year from Cardinal O’Hara in the DMR. But individually, we are still waiting. We’ve actually only had two juniors win individual titles (Tom Mallon and Luke Lefebure). Ironically, Lefebure helped stop Mallon from repeating in the 800. We have had back to back titles from teammates recently as E&S won the 800 (Rhodes, Jones) in 2007-2008 and Bensalem won the 800 in 2013-2014 (Rivera, Francis).

In terms of medalists by event, here are the top programs:

800m – CB South (4 – Mallon x3, Poiesz), 6 Teams tied at 3 (Penn Hills, Cumberland Valley have unique 3)

Mile – O’Hara (4 – James x2, Belfatto, Buck), LaSalle (4 – Coylex2, Billotta, O’Kane), 5 Teams tied at 3 (CRN, GFS, Malvern Prep have unique 3)

3,000m – GFS (4 – Kaulbach, McKenzie, Ortiz, Aziz), CB East (4 – Brophy x2, Josh Izewski, Alex Izewski), North Allegheny (4 – McGoeyx2, Gil, Wharrey), Hatboro Horsham (4 – Comberx2, Hibbs, Quinn)

4x800m – LaSalle (7), North Penn (6), Penncrest (6), CB West (5), Abington (5)

DMR – GFS (8), Henderson (7), 4 Teams Tied at 4

Total Relay Medals – LaSalle (10), GFS (9), Henderson (8), CB West (7)

LaSalle is the only school to have won a distance relay medal at each of the past 10 state championships. Note that GFS and CB West both won two distance medals at the 2016 championships, the first year this was possible.