It's difficult to overstate the accomplishments of Megan Patterson and Valarie Allman, but their impact may have been just as significant in terms of moving the masses as in terms of pushing the outer boundaries. Colorado Track XC file photos.
In this article, I propose to attempt to document recent trends in the girls shot put and discus within the Colorado high school ranks. Trends can be deceptively difficult to spot (and especially so in the short term), and marking trends is risky business, but it's time to take a closer look at what's going on.
Forty feet is the most obvious threshold in high school girls shot put. If we look at counts of girls over 40 feet for each of the last six years, we get eight, five, eight, six, nine, and eight. If you fit a least squares line of regression to those data, you do get a positive slope, but that slope is could easily have happened just by chance variation alone and may or may not mean anything in the absence of additional mea...