About the author: John Granger is a writer, lecturer, and recreational runner living in Wayne, PA, where he teaches at Valley Forge Military Academy. A recognized authority on the Harry Potter books of Joanne Rowling, Granger has written and edited several books about this popular series. He is more likely to tell you, though, about his one State Championship race at Holmdel Park as a High School runner from Mtn. Lakes in 1977, his 59th place finish in the Koza (Okinawa City) Marathon in 1994, or meeting Gerry Lindgren, his childhood hero, two years ago. The father of seven children, the eldest daughter of which pack runs for Radnor and writes for PennTrackXC, Granger wrote this open letter Thursday November 16 to the NTN selection committee in response to PennTrackXC's call for feedback to Nike about Marc Bloom's comments in the Philadelphia Inquirer that morning (See related article). Granger\'s letter is posted here with his permission.
Dear NTN decision makers,
I am a Radnor dad (Hannah Granger is my daughter) and a longtime XC runner and fan. I helped Hannah nominate Gerry Lindgren for the USATF Hall of Fame and campaign for his induction two years ago, during which campaign I corresponded with Marc Bloom. He was a big help to us. I am a friend of Kenny Moore and Joe Henderson, both of whom speak highly of Mr. Bloom and recommended his books to Hannah and me during our research. I make my living as a teacher at Valley Forge Military Academy and as a lecturer and writer on English literature subjects (C. S. Lewis, Harry Potter, etc.).
I have followed NTN since Josh Rowe and company put the idea on the table in Oregon. We lived on the Olympic Peninsula at that time and my only interest then was that of a spectator. Like millions of others, I was excited about the event and about what it would mean for the sport at the High School level. This year, because Hannah's team is in the race for an NTN selection in the Northeast region, I have become a student of the process and mechanics of selection as well.
I teach Journalism at Valley Forge so this morning I read the Philadelphia Inquirer story during my morning search of the paper for interesting subjects. http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/sports/high_school/16022667.htm Don Rich at PennTrackXC.com believes you have decided against giving Radnor a first-comers bid and are preparing the stage for dropping them even from the alternate's list. I am not as upset as Craig Holm, another Radnor dad (and an elite runner as well), or Coach Flanagan are about Mr. Bloom's comments but the comments were especially disappointing for a Bloom fan like me; I cannot remember an NTN official, Nike spokesman, or Mr. Bloom ever making a statement as bald and prejudicial, not to mention unkind, as "Radnor is not a top-10 national team, in my opinion." Hannah ran at Border Clash twice for Washington and our family has always raved on Nike as a class act.
Beyond my disappointment in the frankness of this speech, even in a confession of a very intelligent and knowledgeable man's error, though, there is a substantive reason to be concerned about Mr. Bloom's stated opinion. As someone who has read his books, subscribes to his magazine, and who recognizes my debt to him for all he has done for the sport, this retraction is not reflective of his demonstrated grasp of the ins and outs of Cross Country. Deciding against Radnor – not giving them a first round bid or even an alternate bid – is just wrong-headed.
Sure, I feel this way because I hope my daughter's team gets in. I think this is the case, on the other hand, for three reasons I hope you will take a moment to consider. Not choosing Radnor
• demonstrates that the Northeast Region is de facto the "New York/New Jersey Region;"
• flies in the face of Radnor having complied with and exceeded every written expectation of the NTN founders with respect to consistency, head-to-head competition and end of season improvement; and
• raises the issue of "Speed Ratings," scientism posturing as science, and the place of these ratings in ranking teams.
Let's start with the imbalances of the Northeast Region, what could be called an "institutional bias" in favor of New York and New Jersey teams.
Please understand that I am not whining about individual bias among the Selection committee members or even suggesting the metropolitan media centers get all the coverage or that I am imagining a conspiracy involving the number of shoes sold in New York vs. Pennsylvania. You are doing a very difficult job, you are doing this thankless job well, and I do not intend to add to your burden. You seem to have a collective blindspot, however, about the Northeast region, a blind spot that amounts to an "institutional bias" against Pennsylvania and New England teams.
We like to think that NTN selection is just a matter of the fastest teams being chosen, teams that have worked harder, longer, and smarter and been coached better. This is not the case. All things being equal in terms of coaching and team effort, the reason that Pennsylvania and New England teams are almost certain not to be nominated for selection to the Big Show in Portland comes down to timing of events and demographics. Crunching some numbers and thinking logically, we can see that New York and New Jersey are so big, so densely populated, and their XC end-of-season shows are staged in such a way that their teams have what constitutes a lock on Northeast region bids to NTN.
To understand this, it's necessary to review a picture of the set-up of regions on the NTN map of the US. What appears to be a fairly divided set of States, in which there is little to no gerrymandering, is in fact an imbalanced collection, in which certain states' champions enjoy a relatively certain road to Regional selection. New York is the most obvious example, though New Jersey also enjoys advantages over other states in the Northeast.
Let's look at the NTN regions and their populations (from the Census Bureau 2005 approximations). Adding up the total population of the states in each region, you get a list that looks like this:
Southeast: 70.0 million
Northeast: 54.5 million
Midwest: 46.1 million
South: 36.7 million
California: 36.1 million
Heartland: 19.8 million
Southwest: 17.4 million
Northwest: 15.0 million
Granted, it isn't a list of high school student populations, high school athletes, or of high school runners, even of running shoes sold, all of which data Nike might have used to cut the country up as it has. Assuming, though, that these other population lists reflect to some degree the total population numbers of each region, what we would expect from this list, because more people should mean more and better runners, are (1) dominance by the Southeast and Northeast regions and (2) pathetic teams put up by the Southwest and Northwest. The two "Western" teams together have fewer people than California and each is much less than one fourth the size of the Southeastern region.
In fact, we see both this trend - and we see its opposite. As a rule, the Southeast, #1 in population, runs very poorly at NTN but the Northeast, #2, wins it all. As you know, of the four National Championships won in two years, three have gone to New York teams. The Southwest, next to last in population, however, has had three top 5 finishes, and the Northwest, dead last, has matched them (with two teams placing sixth, just outside the ring). How can regions with much less than a fourth of the population of the biggest region do so much better? In brief, it's school size and concentration of athletes.
I hope to explain that in a longer article I'm putting together for David Willey and I will have to explain it here in summary but a more interesting question is why or how New York and New Jersey are the "heavies" for the Northeast Region and the country. It's not something in their water. It's their being the Goliath states in the Region of Davids.
The logic really is simple. Think High School classifications. Big schools, as a rule, do not play little schools or even those just significantly smaller than their school with respect to the number of students. It just isn't fair to the kids playing to pretend the playing field is even (and in sports like football, it isn't safe). Bigger schools as a rule have more athletes and more athletes almost always means better athletes and better coaching because the better coaches go to where the talent is.
The same is true for Regions to some degree but is certainly true for the competition within a given Region. The Southeast is the largest Region in the country by some 15 million people but for several reasons they don't have much weight in NTN competition. Those reasons are youth culture, school size, and population density. Take a look at the Northeast and Southeast Regions States listed by their size and person-per-square-mile (PPSM) figures (again, from the Census Bureau – forgive me if the chart self-destructs in transmission):
NE State Population (103) PPSM SE State Population (103) PPSM
New York 19.2 402 Florida 17.8 296
Pennsylvania 12.4 274 Georgia 9.0 80
New Jersey 8.7 1,134 North Carolina 8.7 165
Massachusetts 6.4 810 Virginia 7.5 178
Connecticut 3.5 703 Tennessee 5.9 138
New Hampshire 1.3 138 Maryland 5.6 80
Maine 1.3 41 Alabama 4.5 88
Vermont .6 65 South Carolina 4.3 133
Rhode Island 1.0 1,003 Kentucky 4.1 80
Delaware .8 80
West Virginia 1.8 75
The Total Population of the Northeast Region is 54.4 million people and of the Southeast Region is 70.0 million. The average population density or people-per-square-mile is 507 PPSM for the Northeast and 126 PPSM for the Southeast. The reason the best teams in the country come from the second biggest region rather the first is because its population density is almost exactly four times that of the largest region. State population size and population density together are magic for NTN selection because they mean (1) big schools and (2) lots of them.
We all like to think that NTN is a competition that any school can win. Theoretically this is true. According to the numbers of probability, though, it is much more likely to have a school district produce an NTN selection for the Big Show in Portland if the district has a large population of student athletes or concentrates the number of athletes they have in Cross Country by state mandate or tradition. It is also very helpful if the district is in a state with other schools that are large or competitive in Cross Country. Why this is so I'll discuss in a second; a quick look at the size of successful school districts confirms that size and concentration makes for a greater likelihood of there being a NTN successful team. From these school's websites:
School Total Enrollment
Eleanor Roosevelt, MD 3750
Saugus, CA 2738
Corona Del Mar, CA 2182
Saratoga Springs, NY 1629
Colt's Neck, NJ 1604
Midlothian, VA 1600
Iowa City, IA 1522
Sioux Falls-Roosevelt, SD 1418
West Valley, AK 1372
Westfield, IN 1167
Hilton High School, NY 1139
Radnor, PA 862
Yankton, SD 771
Eleanor Roosevelt comes from a small state with sparse population and few big schools to compete against. Being twice the size of even large regional schools, however, creates a pool of athletes that is something like an All-Star Team. As a for instance of what sort of advantage this is, think about Radnor and its neighbor. The school district next to Radnor is Conestoga; if these districts were combined, Radnor would add a Liz Costello to their mix and still be half the size of an Eleanor Roosevelt or Saugus High.
Schools from South Dakota, Alaska, and the Midwest achieve their results even with relatively small student bodies by concentration of students into running sports. Looking at the total enrollment figures above Yankton seems to be the mighty mouse. But looks are deceiving here. In South Dakota the sports sanctioned for girls in the fall are cheerleading, tennis, volleyball, and Cross Country http://www.sdhsaa.com/calendar%20events/Activities%20Calendar.pdf. Radnor High School's 425 girls, in contrast, make up competitive teams in soccer, field hockey, tennis, golf, volleyball, swimming, and Cross Country as well as a Cheerleading group for the football players. Three of these teams have JV squads http://www.rtsd.org/Schools/RHS/RADNOR%20HIGH%20SCHOOL%20SPORTS%20AND%20COACHES.pdf
The math is straight forward. Using Radnor as an example again, in a field hockey and soccer crazy suburb of Philadelphia, more than half the athletic girls in their High School are on those two teams alone, neither of which sports are even offered in South Dakota schools. As a rule, the only stories in the Philadelphia Inquirer's sports pages on girls sports are about Field Hockey and Soccer – and summer time there is all about camps for the girls to play these sports. Radnor has an Astroturf field, not for its football players, but for the use of the girls field hockey team. South Dakota teams, though, by concentrating their girl athletes into only three fall sports, can compete against teams from the East and West Coasts whose States and school districts offer more than twice as many options in the fall and teams with more players and squads than tennis and volleyball. My second daughter stopped running when we moved to Philadelphia to join the Radnor High swim team. 'Nuff said.
It's not just South Dakota that does this. If you include Indiana, Iowa, and Alaska along with South Dakota in the "girls sports deprived" category (Indiana offers tennis, soccer, volleyball, and Cross Country http://www.ihsaa.org/main.shtm, Alaska Cross Country, Swimming, and Volleyball http://www.asaa.org/index.html, and Iowa just Cross Country http://www.iahsaa.org/Index.htm#FALL), you can see the effect of concentration to create the same "large school" effect as population density. Put baldly, Yankton's total enrollment of 771 and Roosevelt's 1418 are roughly equivalent to schools twice their size on the East or West Coasts where High Schools offer more girls team sports with large Varsity and JV teams.
Back to the Northeast and Southeast regions. If population size and density create a pool of large schools, why doesn't the Southeast dominate the country?
• First, as noted above, their population density is far less than the Northeast, 126 PPSM to 507 PPSM. Creating a large regional High School in the Southeast is harder and more expensive than the Northeast and doesn't justify the cost of bussing in heating fuel savings.
• Second, the Southeast has a historical issue that fosters the maintenance of small schools and resistance to large schools, namely, segregation. Though the Southeast is largely integrated today, the high number of private schools and church schools relative to public schools in the Southeast that are a legacy of previous resistance to school integration cuts into the size of the public schools in a given area.
• Last, sadly but undeniably, Cross Country running is still a white person's sport in the United States, to which rule there are too few exceptions. The Southeast has a larger proportion of black athletes than any other region in the country and, unfortunately, very few of these athletes choose to compete as distance runners. [Florida has the additional dissipating factor of being the home of many more elderly people than High School students compared with other states their size.]
The Southeast, then, though the largest region, because their numbers do not translate into population density and large schools or concentration of sports populations into Cross Country, has not produced teams as competitive in NTN as have much smaller regions like the Northwest and Southwest.
The Northeast, though it does not concentrate its athletes into the running sports as other regions do, does have the highest PPSM of any other region. Their dominance is not just because this creates large schools; as we've seen, little states like Maryland and big states like California can put together huge districts like Eleanor Roosevelt and Saugus that create a pool of harriers as large or larger than any school in the Northeast. The densest region's advantage is in the number of these schools it has made, which creates something like a critical mass of competitiveness. That means "in-state big meets with ranked teams."
I've been talking about the Northeast as if it were a region of big states that are very densely populated, any one of which states could produce NTN selection caliber teams. As a point of fact, the size and density of two Northeastern states, when combined with the specific requirements of NTN selection, make it extremely unlikely that a team from New England or Pennsylvania will be chosen over an equal or near equal team from New York or New Jersey.
The New England states simply are too small and, with the exception of tiny Rhode Island, without the necessary population density to create a large school pool and running culture. Pennsylvania has a much harder time in winning selection because it is much smaller than New York, much less densely populated than New Jersey, and is unable to compete with either New York or New Jersey on an equal footing because of specific NTN selection rules. This last is the blind spot of the NTN selection committee and the point of my writing you about Mr. Bloom's remarks in this morning's Inquirer.
For the numbers on population and density in the Northeast, see the above chart. Pennsylvania has 2/3 the population and PPSM density of New York and only a fifth of New Jersey's density, if it is 1.5 times the population size of the Garden State. The likelihood of a NTN caliber cross country team coming out of Pennsylvania is much less, consequently, than of one coming out of New York or New Jersey.
That makes Pennsylvania no different than most other states whose teams are unlikely to have the super-girl runners with sufficient fast back-up to make a winning five compared with New York and New Jersey. This difficulty is just the way things are. Life is unfair.
The problem is, when good teams do surface in states neighboring New York and New Jersey, they have to be much better than teams from those states in order to win an NTN selection because of the criteria for NTN selection and how it works in the Northeast. All things being near equal, the New York and New Jersey teams have a de facto lock on NTN selection from their region.
The criteria for NTN selection as laid out two years ago and maintained since seem as simple and as fair as such things can be. The teams that, in the opinion of the NTN selection committee, (1) have performed at the highest level throughout the season but with special emphasis on end-of-season excellence and (2) have demonstrated their team strength in head-to-head competition with other ranked teams will receive one of the two bids from each region or be eligible for an alternate bid from the pool of two 'extra' bids available to teams from all regions.
Pennsylvania and New England teams have little chance of winning an NTN first or "at-large" bid against a slightly inferior or comparable New York or New Jersey team even if they meet every one of these criteria. The deck is stacked in two important ways for the NY and NJ squads.
• First, the population size and density of NY and the PPSM of NJ create a greater number of larger schools than Pennsylvania or New England states will have. This not only creates better teams as a rule but, to the point, it means more races of quality against ranked teams during the season and post season. Pennsylvania and New England teams, even if they are as good or better than NY or NJ teams, because of travel restrictions during a season and the simple fact they cannot compete in NY and NJ state meets and super-championship meets, almost certainly cannot create the NTN resume of head-to-head competition that like-quality or inferior NY and NJ teams can.
• Second, being excluded from the New York and New Jersey state meets and super championship meets, the Pennsylvania and New England teams are unable to demonstrate "end of season" excellence that is weighted by the NTN bid committee because the NY and NJ meets take place two weeks after the Pennsylvania and New England State Championship races. Simply put, the NY and NJ teams are in a spotlight for the very weeks that NTN selection is made. The winners of the NY Federations meet and the New Jersey Meet of Champions race, because of the number and quality of school teams in these races, have won what are essentially regional qualifiers when Pennsylvania and New England teams in the region are idle.
It isn't whining to point out these facts. The uphill-battle NTN experiences of Radnor and Coatesville this year, the best girls and boys Cross Country teams to come out of Pennsylvania in a decade or more, demonstrate that Keystone State harriers have to be much better than NY or NJ teams to earn an NTN bid. I know the Radnor story so I'll share it here as prima facie if anecdotal evidence of the two points of disadvantage non-NY and non-NJ teams have over all others in competition for NTN bids.
I wrote a letter to Josh Rowe when NTN was first announced to thank him in advance for the great things this event was bound to do for the sport and for girls especially. He was kind enough to respond at some length about their hopes. Having read as much Marc Bloom writing as I have, I share his misgivings about the current weirdness of girls Cross Country, in which the fast \"four year girl\" is something of the freak and the eighth grader pixie with an over-sized anaerobic engine is more often the celebrated star. We are beginning to see teams like Radnor\'s, though, that have four seniors in their top five who have run through the years of hormonal transition and become better runners and people for the experience. I believe events like NTN have fostered this maturation of the sport even in only three years of competition. Coaching is getting better among the girls (Marc Bloom, so long the heroic voice in the wilderness on this important issue, isn\'t the only one talking about amenorrhea these days), schools are becoming more supportive, and the better girl athletes are coming out and sticking with it. Frankly, little Radnor\'s big season and big hopes for the future seem to be exactly what Rowe and Truax told me Nike envisioned at NTN\'s beginnings.
Because Radnor High realized early last summer they had a shot at NTN, they have played hard and fast by the rules NTN has laid down for team selection. Coach Flanagan knew that his girls had to race in big meets against ranked teams and that their performance throughout the season with weight given to end of season races would be what the NTN XC mavens would be examining. He went to the school, consequently, and begged for money to travel overnight to an invitational in NY in order to run against the defending national champions.
And here is the first rub. Not living in New York or in New Jersey where the other ranked teams were, the Radnor team knew it had to pick the one right race because they would only be able to make the trip once. New York and New Jersey teams are able to go to local and in-state invitationals to run against ranked teams. Pennsylvania and New England schools have to go out-of-state for this NTN critical experience. Flanagan knew his team's one shot had to be relatively early in the season because of Central League competition in October that the AD or school would not let him miss. He chose Warwick Valley to face Hilton. In what is no small tribute to how highly Radnor holds Coach Flanagan, small but wealthy Radnor High for the first time sent a team out-of-state and over night for a non-championship event. The girls crushed the NY ranked teams heavy field and lost in a squeaker to Hilton, a race the Hilton coach had a hard time believing he won even after they corrected the scoring mistake that had made Radnor the winner right after the race. Radnor had chosen the right race for their one shot and they jumped in both the NTN regional and Harrier rankings.
But that would be their only out-of-state shot. Though they have improved and won-out the season, their stock has continued to fall compared to New York teams, except in Mr. Bloom's Harrier poll. Today he disavowed those rankings that put Radnor well above the NY teams but why he has done this remains a mystery. As Don Rich pointed out in a public letter to Nike, while Radnor is a better and faster team than it was at Warwick Valley because of the return of June Farley and the rise of Liz Milewski as a front runner, Hilton has faded. If Hilton ran as fast last Saturday on the same Warwick Valley course as they had in September against Radnor, they would have won their State meet handily. As it was, their #3 girl ran well over a minute slower and they wound up in the Fayetteville-Manlius/Saratoga pack. How has Radnor fallen below Hilton? Beats me.
NTN isn't just about head-to-head competition. We should talk, too, about consistency September to November. Since that race in Warwick Valley the last weekend in September, as I've said, the Radnor girls have had their fourth senior, June Farley, return to the team and break into their top five (#3 at Hershey). If June had raced Varsity at Warwick Valley, Radnor wins easily. And Warwick Valley wasn't Radnor's only big win of the season. Radnor has won the Delaware County race (\"DelCo\'s\"), Pennsylvania\'s huge District 1, and the AAA State meet as well. They beat a young Emmaus team there that for some reason has never been mentioned on the NTN Northeast boards despite averaging under 19:00 at their District meet and being undefeated in-state until Hershey. Radnor has consistently won and won big all season.
Which brings us to the second disadvantage Pennsylvania teams endure. If Radnor had had a season like Fayetteville-Manlius or Colt's Neck has had, seasons in which the team was effectively running the JV squad or just running poorly through September and October while resting their stars for the big end-of-season meets, would the Pennsylvania team be considered for NTN selection in November? Pardon my rhetorical question. Only the exclusive NY and NJ state and super-championship meets that take place after the Pennsylvania and New England championships make possible these NY and NJ "come-backs" that can displace more consistent and much improved teams from other states.
So why would Marc Bloom, an intelligent man who has given more to the sport than any man I know, think Radnor is not the team he thought they were? Radnor girls have run well throughout the season unlike Colt\'s Neck and Fayetteville-Manlius, they have traveled to a \"Big Meet\" to race against ranked competition and done well, and they have \"won-out\" their season, winning against enormous fields and fast teams on both golf course flat courses and mini-mountain ranges a la Mt. SAC. Having met every one of NTN\'s stated requirements for an NTN bid from the Northeast region, Mr. Bloom's saying this morning \"Radnor is not a top-10 national team" doesn't seem to make sense.
I can only think of two reasons that Mr. Bloom would have changed his mind. I admire his courage in saying he was wrong almost as much as I do his decades of work to foster the sport nationwide. I hope my speculation about why he thinks he was wrong is not taken as another slam on him from a Pennsylvania and Radnor partisan. As he has admitted that even he can make mistakes, I feel free to point out that his mistake is not what he thought it was but his rethinking and withdrawing his having ranked Radnor #6 US, well ahead of Saratoga and Hilton (Fayetteville-Manlius and Colt's Neck not even being on his list).
The two reasons I can think of for Mr. Bloom's re-estimation of Radnor come from their win at the Pennsylvania AAA State Championships in Hershey. My guess is that he thought the team didn't run fast enough there based on Bill Meylan's 'Speed Ratings' and that Liz Milewski didn't perform at the level he thought she needed to in order to prove she is the "front runner" every great team has and Radnor needs.
Don Rich's open letter to the NTN selection committee explains why Radnor ran the way they did at Hershey but I'll risk repeating what he said (and that he demonstrated via their splits). As my daughter Hannah wrote in her PennTrackXC.com description of the race, everyone from Radnor knew that Coach Flanagan\'s strategy was not for great times but for insuring a win. The fast start and miles of hills on this brand new course were a great set-up for his team to be \"walked-down\" by an ever improving Emmaus squad. PIAA coach of the year Flanagan, consequently, told his front runners not to run out with the leaders. In so doing, he could be sure none of his girls would DNF on the rough backside of the Hershey range and lose the race. It also meant they would not be running as fast as they might have.
Can anyone seriously argue with Flanagan\'s strategy? Essentially, he told Emmaus the State Championship was theirs if they ran much faster than they had ever run and if his girls only ran a good race. Milewski and Farley ran very well, however, and everyone finished, so Emmaus, a team that should be on the NTN lists but is not, will have to wait another year. Radnor had its first AAA State Cross Country Championship. Milewski did not finish with the leaders, but as Mr. Rich demonstrated, she ran very well after her coach gave her the green light to leave the Radnor pack (after the last hills at 2.5 miles). If Mr. Bloom's changed estimate of Radnor's standing was because Liz didn't run the race she did at Districts, I think a man who has forgotten more this afternoon about the sport than I will ever know mistook Flanagan's "Villanova-brand" smarts for Milewski weakness.
The only other reason I can think of for Marc Bloom's dropping Radnor and agreeing with the rest of you that Radnor is #3 Northeast or lower is the faux science of "Speed numbers." I like Bill Meylan; he is a generous and serious student of the sport. But his 'Speed Ratings' numbers are not what he and the internet mavens in New York thinks they are. Speed ratings are a well-intended effort to solve the challenge of comparing teams and individuals that do not compete head-to-head because of time, geography, or available meets. The numbers generated, however, are scientism rather than science because:
* Each speed rating unit, the individual point or digit in speed ratings (call it \"one Meylan\") is equal to how many 3 second increments any runner would be faster than 26 minutes for Meylan\'s standardized or base XC course - a Section 3 race from NY in 1999 he favors. Unlike a degree Celsius or a meter, the Meylan has no natural value or correspondence. The single digit foundation of the Speed rating number measures and signifies nothing but an arbitrarily assigned relativity. It is a quantification of a conjecture consequent to assumption, most importantly, the hope-replacing-demonstration that average runners in given races do not vary from year to year so course correction values to Meylan\'s 1999 race will be consistent.
For measurements to have truth value, though, as anyone conversant with scientific method remembers, they must either reflect a meaningful correspondence with an unchanging reality (e.g., the heat necessary to raise one cc of water one degree Celsius) or create a new coherence by establishing a known standard (e.g., the byte). The Meylan unit corresponds to nothing but Mr. Meylan\'s course correction values and his preferred baseline. The new coherence the Meylan unit creates is based on nothing more sure than his conjecture and rests on nothing but the convenience of a three digit number in comparing one runner to the next.
* Moreover, the variables of course conditions and length as well as team/individual strategies on any given day are so numerous that the claimed precision of the Speed ratings number is at best a tens place rather than singles digit claimed, which difference makes the measure no improvement on simple calculations of rate (time divided by distance). As Ian Fraser, a Marine biologist on the Puget Sound, one of the country\'s best marathon runners, a coaching protege of Tom Donnelly at Haverford College and a USATF and HS coach himself, explains:
These speed ratings are reasonable rankings of performances (not performers) with an error of ~ +/-10 (that\'s +/- 30 seconds). It is not going to tell you anything you don\'t know about a team you have been following. It could be helpful for taking quick looks at teams and courses you\'re not familiar with, but anyone who\'s taking them as serious rankings of teams or runners with 1 digit precision is not being honest with themselves.
Scientists call this sort of distortion a \"significant figures\" error. Telescopes observing astral phenomenon do not measure things in microns, miles, or even thousands of miles but millions of miles or light years. To claim to know the distance with greater precision would be to forfeit what accuracy the instrument has because of known variables and its limitations. A telescope can do things a ruler cannot; it cannot claim to do what a ruler does well, however. Speed ratings if all rounded to the tens place (164 = 160, 166 = 170, etc.) would become less precise but more accurate and honest to the limitations of the measuring instrument. No one would use Speed Ratings rounded to tens, of course, because they would lose their supposed but really non-existent handicapping or comparative value.
* Most important to me and I hope to old school runners and fans like yourselves, the Meylan numbers have no nuance and pretend to quantify mystery. Cross Country running performance can be measured by number (again, time divided by distance) but individual and team performances are not contained or accurately portrayed by number because of the many immeasurably qualities of every race. A race run by an individual has a quality not unlike color. Color can be quantified into numbers on a light spectrum with no little precision and accuracy using a spectroscope just as a race can be described with splits and finish times. The spectroscope measurements, however useful for manipulation of colors across a spectrum, though, are largely meaningless for grasping what color is.
These numbers will not create the experience of color to a blind man because color is a quality that is not restricted or encompassed by its quantitative description. Strategy, course conditions and length and layout, individual experience, and the vagaries of opposing teams among other things each give every race its unique quality. Pretending that these variables and irreducible qualities have been captured by a single course correction made from data bases of previous years\' running on that course and individual performaces that year is reductionism and scientism of the most unfortunate kind. NTN wisely chose head-to-head competition as its public standard to avoid this kind of error.
* I should also mention, if only in passing, two things: the ratings are a misuse of a previous tool and the numbers are not reproducible. First, Speed ratings are an invalid use of a tool designed for handicapping horses in the 1970\'s. Species differences, course differences (Cross Country courses differ almost as much from one to the next as race tracks are the same everywhere), and the broad differences in intention between horse handicapping and Mr. Meylan\'s stated objectives are so great that extrapolation from one use to another is essentially wasted effort. That no one can derive Meylan numbers except Mr. Meylan, of course, establishes their subjectivity. He is, as I've said, a very gracious and generous man. This lends authority to his numbers, an authority they cannot have in themselves because no one else can generate them.
Making judgments about Radnor consequent to their speed ratings at Hershey via comparing them with their previous ratings or recent NY races at Warwick Valley and Colt\'s Neck at Holmdell Park reveals the deception inherent to these numbers. Radnor\'s race was to win rather than generate \"speed ratings\" numbers - and the novelty of the course almost insured they would suffer in comparison with races established in Meylan\'s data base.
Coach Flanagan, a Villanova product who has studied the sport and coached for several decades, is no dummy and his savvy was on display at Hershey when he dared Emmaus to beat his girls. But in terms of Speed Ratings, the poor guy couldn\'t win. If one of his girls DNF\'d, of course, the team Speed Rating profile would be killed and the Championship lost.
Worse, if they ran for Speed Rating glory and risked losing the State Championship, even if they won and ran very fast, the novelty of the course meant they lost in relation to NY or NJ teams on established courses. As Meylan himself admits, his system is weakest on rainy days, early in the season when he does not have established references for team runners, and on courses where he does not have historical data for his graphic work to establish a dependable point of intersection to contrast with his established baseline. So what?
Having no data for Hershey\'s new course which produced some incredible boys\' times but was much slower than the Lehigh course or even Warwick Valley, Meylan\'s ratings for the Radnor girls predictably showed no improvement. As the numbers had to show, believe it or not, even if not running on Flanagan\'s win-first strategy. The Radnor ratings, because they have references from other courses in Meylan\'s database, were based as much on those prior runs as they were on their Hershey race. In effect, Radnor was setting the baseline for Hershey rather than Hershey\'s baseline setting a course correction value for Radnor. This is not true, of course, for any of the NY teams running at Warwick Valley or NJ teams running at Holmdell Park. They get a big bump because of the "historic" quality of the "average runner in these races," supposedly faster than the average runner at, say, Warwick Valley Invitational.
My gut feeling is that Mr. Bloom is no advocate of 'Speed Ratings.' My experience with the things he has written is that he is experienced enough and smart enough not to have fallen into the Mystery Cult of Speed Ratings, an ever-growing cult on the DyeStat boards (where fans wait for Mr. Meylan's number so they can know how fast people really ran). Please forgive me the long digression on this subject. Even if this was not Mr. Bloom's error, mistaken trust in Bill Meylan's numbers is icing on the cake to the institutional bias in favor of New York and New Jersey teams. His database is loaded with NY and NJ history – and Pennsylvania and New England teams have to be much better than Empire and Garden State teams to overcome the NTN criteria and Speed Ratings bias in favor of these teams in the Northeast.
This has been overly long and I apologize for writing at such length. I hope that I have helped make the case that:
• Radnor is as good or better than the three NY teams that ran a virtual dead heat last week at Warwick Valley and that the Radnor team has met and exceeded every criteria set by the NTN selection committee;
• The biases consequent to demographics and meet timing have made the NTN selection process in the Northeast region a lock for New York or New Jersey teams; and
• 'Speed Ratings' are faux science fronted by an admirable, well-intentioned individual, whose numbers only make the institutional bias favoring NY and NJ teams that much greater.
Thank you for reading this, for all the work you do for NTN and Cross Country running at the High School level, and, yes, thank you in advance for whatever consideration you give Radnor for an NTN bid. Whether you choose them or not, however, I hope you will take a serious look into the blind spots that makes it so much harder for a team outside New York or New Jersey to win an NTN bid in the Northeast.
Respectfully submitted,
John Granger