Ana Holland certainly made her mark on the 5A Girls 400, but she hasn't been the only one making contributions.
To this point, we've looked for trends in 3A Boys results, 3A Girls results, and 5A Boys results from state meets from 2000 forward.
This time, we'll look at 5A Girls results and then call it a series.
So, are there trends worth noting in the 5A Girls results (average of top six marks from State) since 2000? We'll start with the usual look at the graphs. As a reminder, the vertical axis is seconds (track events, less is better) or inches (field events, more is better).
Um, wow, that certainly looks like an impressive downward trend to me. In fact, if you try to fathom going from an average of over 58 seconds for the top six places to an average of less than 54 seconds, it's going to knock some of the wind out of you. And, this is a rather consistent downward trend.
This isn't quite as clearly a downward trend as we saw at 400 meters, but it definitely does seem to be tending downward nonetheless. And, the fact that the 1600 gets tactical from time to time might help to explain why we see some back-and-forth with the 1600 times.
There was a major peak and valley (or, if you prefer, valley and peak) in 2005 and 2008, but the trend is still fairly clearly toward faster times in the 300 Hurdles.
While not as linear in fashion at the 400 meters, the trend is clearly downward for the 4x100 as well.
The trend was downward until 2014, but it's hard to know what to make of the last two years. Is this a bit of a market correction or a new trend developing in the opposite direction. Another year or two of data may help us to better understand the answer to that question.
Here we have no well-defined trend. There are peaks, and there are valleys. Between them is not yet a lot of apparent rhyme or reason. 2016 was the worst year for the 5A Girls high jump since 2000--at least for the top six average at State.
Although it is far from smoothly linear, there's really no mistaking the steady upward climb of pole vault performances for 5A Girls.
The most favorable thing we can say here about 5A Girls shot put marks is that performances have stagnated. It could be that we're seeing a bit of an overall downward trend as well, but with the sawtoothing going on, it's difficult to be very confident about calling this a case of clear decline.
The overall picture here would seem to be that we're seeing some pretty solid improvement for 5A Girls in track events, but the picture on field events is more of a mixed bag. Certainly, the only field event we looked at that can make any sort of case for ongoing improvement is the pole vault. The other two were, at best, flat.
