General Thoughts
I’m
interested to see how all the rain and mud affect the results at states this
coming weekend. I’m not so much worried about the course as just the recovery
of the athletes. If you’re running through super sloppy conditions at Buhl Park
and then you have to come back and run Hershey seven days later, I don’t think
things are going to be easy.
Plus,
we already lost some talented runners at a variety of district meets because
they had sub-par days at their district championships in the adverse
conditions. That’s always kind of sad as you’d like to see the best all race
one another, but it’s just a part of how things go.
I’m
also quite curious about how the WPIAL guys will handle states. Over the past
two weeks they’ve run two grueling races at Cal U which is widely acclaimed as
one of the toughest courses in the state and now they have to come back and run
at Hershey (which is no picnic). I hope everyone can keep their legs underneath
them because each of the classifications has at least one team hoping to win
state gold.
In order
to project the state meet as best I could (because as I’ve been not subtle in
mentioning, I’m not expecting to be all that great on the prediction front this
year), I actually built out a full model with every state championship
participant’s finish projected. Remember, I don’t run a blog any more so I’ve
got some time on my hands. Last year, I did this for AAA and was off by, on
average, about 20-25 spots per runner with variation in either direction. It’s
not a perfect system (especially when you whiff on multiple guys from the same
team like Bishop Shanahan last year), but it at least gave me something to base
things off. Keep your fingers crossed I didn’t overlook any big names.
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