In 2015, Jordyn Colter broke a couple long-standing records at the state meet, but what's the bigger picture?
The four weeks of the year where there is essentially nothing to report on from a track and field or cross country perspective have just begun. Among other things, that means I have to work a little harder to come up with content for a while.
One project I've started work on is trends in state meet results over the last 15 years or so. As of today, I should have complete results posted to all athlete pages for state track and field meets going back to the year 2000. That's actually a nice bit of data to work with.
So, I intend to work with it a little now that I have some time to do it.
Specifically, I'm going to look at trends in marks in 3A and 5A over that period of time for the following events: 400, 1600, 300 Hurdles, 4x100, 4x800, High Jump, Pole Vault, and Shot Put.
I'm picking 3A and 5A because I want a large-school and small-school category. 2A won't work well because 1A got split off of 2A during the interim, thus confusing any measure of trends in top marks. 5A just seems like a more natural selection than 4A--why not go with the largest schools instead of one tier down in school size?
I have purposely avoided events where wind reading plays a major role. It's difficult to say how to incorporate wind readings into any analysis, and wind readings aren't always available as the results go back to the year 2000. I'm not picking all events because that just seems a little like overkill to me at this point and I'd like to get to the end of this project a bit more on the side of sooner than on the side of later.
I wanted a couple of relays, and the 4x100 and 4x800 seemed like naturals since I wasn't using the 100 or 800 as individual events.
I will do both boys and girls. There's no compelling reason to believe the trend lines are the same for the two genders, so different analyses are warranted.
So, this article is really about giving you advance notice of what's coming. I'm excited to see what turns up when the cranking of numbers is done. I hope you're similarly excited. I suspect that you, like me, have a few ideas about what the conclusion of it all might be. We'll see how well founded those ideas prove to be.
Other articles to keep an eye out for in the near future include my annual Christmas wish list of items for Colorado high school track and cross country, a countdown of the top ten Colorado stories of the cross country season just completed, a revisit of the question of well-to-do schools and cross country success, possibly an announcement or two about upcoming meets, and more.
Keep checking in. You'll be glad you did.
