By The Splits
In a perfect world, or at least later in the season, we would have seen all four of these teams run multiple times with multiple lineups to really understand what they will throw down against each other but we are not the lucky. We do though have years of splits and history to look upon to figure out exactly how fast this race will be.
For starters, the national record (1:35.86) had the following splits- 24.3, 24.4, 24.2, and a monster 23.2 from Shalonda Solomon on anchor.
This brings us to breaking down some of the averages for these four teams. These averages are based on their 2016 outdoor 200m bests and averaged out.
St. Jago enters as the favorites averaging 24.525. Grassfield comes in second at 24.55 and return everyone from last year's 1:38.69 performance. Third is the Bullis School who average 24.73 but already average 24.715 indoors this year... yeah, they are scary good as well. Coming in at fourth is Cheltenham at 24.74 and finally in fifth are current US leaders Western Branch with a 24.79 average.
In simpler terms, all five teams ranked here average 200m times that would equal roughly 1:38.00 at worst. In fact, the slowest average team is Western Branch and they have already run 1:37.50 this season. Imagine what they and everyone will run against each other.