By this time of the season, it's reasonable to expect that we would be seeing a few of the state-qualifying marks (top 18) for this season closing in on, or perhaps even exceeding, what it took to get to State last year.
So, with that in mind, let's take a closer look. The table below shows the minimum marks required to advance to State in 5A Girls in both 2015 and 2016. The next column shows the most current (as of April 18) #18 ranking in the state for this season.
What we see is that distance (1600, 3200) is already ramping up as tougher this year than either of the last two years, and that with four weeks of qualifying remaining. Who knows where that will go? The horizontal jumps are also rapidly closing in on previous standards, while most of the rest of the marks seem about on pace to end up close to where they ended last year (save the 200, which may have been impacted last year by scratches).
| 5A Girls | 2015 | 2016 | 04/18/2017 |
| 100 | 12.45 | 12.50 | 12.70 |
| 200 | 25.65 | 26.36 | 26.16 |
| 400 | 58.61 | 59.46 | 1:00.20 |
| 800 | 2:18.31 | 2:19.74 | 2:23.00 |
| 1600 | 5:17.28 | 5:17.97 | 5:15.95 |
| 3200 | 11:29.98 | 11:35.60 | 11:29.53 |
| 100H | 15.33 | 15.60 | 16.46 |
| 300H | 46.48 | 46.71 | 48.49 |
| 4x100 | 49.95 | 50.13 | 51.03 |
| 4x200 | 1:45.99 | 1:46.24 | 1:47.96 |
| 4x400 | 4:07.63 | 4:09.31 | 4:15.77 |
| 4x800 | 9:51.87 | 9:52.67 | 10:23.08 |
| SMR8 | 1:50.65 | 1:50.98 | 1:53.91 |
| HJ | 5-1 | 5-1.5 | 5-0 |
| PV | 9-6 | 9-10 | 9-5 |
| LJ | 17-0 | 16-10 | 16-8.5 |
| TJ | 35-4.75 | 35-2 | 35-0 |
| SP | 34-10.5 | 35-8 | 32-11.75 |
| DT | 111-5 | 114-4 | 106-11 |