Among 3A girls, nobody tosses the shot put farther than Megan Patterson. Colorado Track XC file photo.
One way of estimating the relative strength of teams coming into the track season is to simulate a meet by taking the best performances of returning athletes from 2009 and placing them into a mock meet. We just did that for 3A girls and, based on those results, it looks like the teams that were dominant last year are in position to be there again.
Of course, virtual meets contested nearly three full months before state provide no guarantee of anything that happens in May, but they are a decent starting point for a conversation.
Both of the top two team finishers, The Classical Academy and Eaton, graduated some points off of last year's state teams, but both return the strength of the lineups that got them there. Lyons lost slightly more to graduation than either TCA or Eaton, but any team with Rachel Hinker in the lineup is a dangerous team, and Hinker is not the only contributor. Sam Berggren can do a lot of things well for Middle Park and so they should figure in the team race as well. Even Sam Berggren, however, can't score points in five events as shown below. So, one event will have to go for her--presumably that's the 100, but time will tell.
With all that as prologue, here's what the team scores for 3A girls (assuming all individuals stayed with the same school, participate in track this spring, etc.) break down as:
Calculated as of March 01, 2010
These rankings were calculated by scoring the rankings as a meet. We took the individual rankings and scored them as a normal meet: 10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1. No relay events are calculated into team scores due to the difficulties inherent in identifying and "replacing" graduated relay legs. Athletes whose graduation years are unknown were left out of the list.