You were promised a summary article on how useful virtual meets are. It has now arrived, one day behind the intended schedule of release.
As my test case, I used the preseason virtual meets from last cross country season and compared them to state meet results, because that is what we really want to know at the beginning of the season--who's going to take state this year, and who's going to come close?
The virtual meets did have about half of the state champions picked correctly, though you hardly needed a virtual meet to pick a couple of those.
More importantly, the virtual meets typically picked about 80% of the eventual top 12 teams correctly, and usually within about three places of their actual end-of-year finish. That's a pretty solid success rate when you stop to think of all the things that can impact who finishes where during a cross country season--athletes moving in, athletes moving out, incoming freshmen, injuries, athletes deciding not to come out, athletes deciding to come out after not participating earlier in high school (think Brie Oakley on that one), changes in coaching staff, changes in team leadership, etc.
And, in theory, either the preseason virtual meet or a virtual meet after only one or two weeks of the season are the least accurate virtual meets you'll see. Preseason virtual meets don't "see" the newcomers on your team (or the kids who didn't come out this year). Very early virtual meets from the season itself have some issues with varying course difficulty that haven't quite had the chance to even out yet.
Even so, it's still kind of tempting to run a virtual meet after the first weekend or two. Just take the results with a grain of salt.
And, it is a known fact that the teams who ran at Liberty Bell will tend to occupy all the top rungs of the virtual meet ladder for at least a couple of weeks after that meet is in the books.
By mid season, virtual meets are very definitely starting to zero in on the top teams, and in something at least close to the order they're likely to finish at state. They may miss a corner of truth here and there, but they don't lie.
So, maybe now you're a little more interested in doing virtual meets than you have been in the past. There are two ways to do a virtual meet on Colorado Track XC. Both ways have their advantages and disadvantages. Both are accessed by clicking rankings on the main navigation bar.
After you've clicked on Rankings, you will want to select either Virtual Meets or XC Team Scores. I'll treat the two separately here. Both Virtual Meets and XC Team Scores are open only the MileSplit Pro Members. You can start your membership here.
Virtual Meets
This form of virtual meet, and the first virtual meet tool MileSplit created, lists all the potential participants in order of their best time from the season. If you know an athlete has moved away, has suffered a season-ending injury, or some other such thing, you can remove that athlete from the virtual meet analysis by hovering over their line in the results and clicking on the X that appears to delete their entry. You can also hover over their time and adjust to a different time as a way of saying, "What if..." Those are the strengths and flexibilities of the virtual meet tool.
In a virtual meet, you may either select your teams manually by checking the boxes next to the team names, or you may use one of the prepopulated options in the League dropbox. The rest of the dashboard settings should be intuitive.
The default setting is for five scorers and two displacers. If you're doing a 2A virtual meet, you will probably want three scorers and three displacers (and you hope a proposal passes this fall to adjust that to four and two). You can make those adjustments from the scoring box that appears to the right of the virtual meet results.
XC Team Scores
This is the more recently created virtual meet for cross country scoring. It does not have provisions for eliminating particular athletes or adjusting times, but it allows you to do cross country style scoring on track and field results (e.g., 1600 times and 3200 times). That is often a very useful way of looking at who has made the most progress during track season in the spring.
There is no provision for selecting your own teams in XC Team Scoring (unless, that is, you are a master at hacking the url line code). You will need to select a "league" from the League dropbox on the dashboard of the tool. Not to worry, though, I have created an incredible variety of leagues. There are the usual leagues you think of, plus classifications for cross country, classifications for track and field, several different counties, and so on. Once the teams have been determined for state through regional qualifying, I will populate new "leagues" for just those teams as well.
All other dashboard settings should be reasonably intuitive.
Enjoy, but be warned that these tools can become addictive.