How To Track!
Presents
The Milestat How To: How'd It Do?
We hope, if nothing else, that you enjoyed reading through the first batch of "How to Win" articles. There are a few important notes that we want to touch on, just in case it wasn't clear from the original article:
How To Track! is NOT Nolan Jez. Nolan has way too much to do to waste time researching the 800m pr of the 2009 Milestat Invitational girls individual champion. We aren't Brandon Miles either, he does.... Well we don't really know what he does but he's really busy too.
The "How To" guides use real statistical data to generate the requirements. As much as we'd like to produce an opinion piece with predictions, feelings, and instincts we feel like that has already been done enough.
So let's start the debriefing. When you build a mathematical model you get one of two outcomes, it either works exactly right (rare) or you learn from where it went wrong and tweak for next time.
Individual Girls A Champion
Congratulations are in order for Miss. Rachel Mudd of Atlee HS. She takes home the title of Milestat Girls A Champion, AND the biggest model breaker of the day! That was the first How To we wrote, we got better as the week went on. Despite Mudd not having a single one of the "requirements" we listed there was one important thing that the data absolutely nailed.
Average winning time of the Girls A race prior to 2018: 17:45
Rachel's winning time: 17:44
We'll take a win, no matter how small! In all truth, we couldn't be happier that our How To was wrong for a good reason!
Congratulations Rachel!
Individual Boys A Champion
Well... shoot. The single most consistent stat in this whole meet, was that a senior boy had won the A race every year the meet had been contested. All it took was How To Track! opening our mouth and pointing this fact out to everyone for that streak to end.
Don't get us wrong though, the seniors had a great day: 6 under 16:00, and 14 in the top 20.
But this race was all about Daniel O'Brien. When he crossed the finish line, we groaned. First, Mudd breaks the girls' model. Now this! BUT, then we started digging up stats. Other the age, our requirements describe Daniel perfectly:
A top 12 finish at Milestat the year prior to victory: O'Brien was 10th in 2017 running 15:47 as a sophomore
1600m PR near 4:13.6: O'Brien's PR 4:19.87
3200m PR near 9:18.1: O'Brien's PR 9:17.47
2:30 1000 or 1:56 800: Ok, so he doesn't have this one. It's XC season, so this one held the least significance anyway. His 800m PR isn't too far off with a 1:58, and that's still 9 seconds Lomogda's HS PR (again... C'mon man)
Last but astonishingly cool....
Average winning time of the Boys' A Division coming into 2018: 15:16
O'Brein's 2018 winning time: 15:13
How cool is that? Given 8 data points we predicted the winning times with an average margin of error of 2 seconds. Don't worry, we'll clap for ourselves.
Congrats Daniel. You are a total beast make us a prophet and get to Footlocker or NXN Finals this year.
Girls Team Champions
Plain and simple here, Colonial Forge exceeded the requirements in the How To guide in just about every way. They DIDN'T put two girls under 19:00 (Only Atlee did that, but Atlee also had 3 scorers over 20:00) and they DIDN'T have all five under 20:00. But they were really, really close. CF's #2 Allison Fick ran 19:01, and CF's #5 ran 20:09. If you read the How To guide, you might remember that the 2011 Blacksburg squad was the only team to win this event with a fifth runner over 20:00. Eerily enough that girl ran 20:09 too. Do you have goosebumps too? No?!? Yeah... me neither. Don't give CF's #5, Megan Savoie, too much grief though. She scored 52 points and beat every other team's #5 by at least 19 points.
In terms of places, this race was never close. CF had the 3rd best #1, the 2nd best #2 and had the best #3,#4, and #5 in the race. Once again the team with the best #3 runner won the day! We had said the 3rd runner had to be in the chute scoring no worse than 24th. Forge was the only team to accomplish this AND went a level beyond, putting 4 scorers in the top 20.
Boys Team Champions
How To Track was SCARY GOOD here, but at first we didn't even realize how good we did. It's not very often that a team sneaks past us during a race. Standing at the finish line, we thought Deep Run won, the announcer thought Deep Run had won, the people around us thought Deep Run had won. Then we got the results, and Deep Run was 2nd for the 3rd consecutive year. "Wow, it must have been close." We thought. It wasn't, W.T. Woodson won the thing by 54 points. In doing so, they continued Northern Virginia's dominance at Pole Green. NOVA has now won 5 of the 7 Milestat's that have been held at PGP. We DID tell you about this phenomenon in How To Win the Boys title.... Just saying. But how did Woodson get past us? How did we miss this one? Two reasons:
I think half of the field wore either navy blue or black with white lettering. James River, seriously, bring back the purple uni's.
By the time Deep Run's #2 crossed the line Woodson already had four guys huddled in the chute.
Here's how the Cavaliers got the job done:
No team hit the "instant win" criteria of #1 in the top 7 scorers, and #2 in the top 20. (This is a win for HTT. If someone had met this criteria and lost, we'd be in trouble)
In our How To Win guide we gave EVERYONE the blueprint to win. We even used the word blueprint! Go look! Maybe Nolan can even put a link to it right here. The blueprint was: have a top 7 scorer and the rest of your top 5 in the top 75 scorers. Only two teams followed our blueprint, Woodson's scoring spread was 3rd to 60th and Deep Run's scoring spread was 5th to 54th. The difference is that Woodson was significantly better at every place in between.
After a 22 point #2 runner, Woodson won the sacred 3rd man race (Woodson's #3 was 25th, Atlee's #3 was 27th, no one else had a #3 inside the top 40)
They CRUSHED the field at the #4 spot (Senior John Leal scored just 37 points as Woodson's #4, 16 points better than any other team)
With all of the big runs from their top 4 guys Woodson only needed an average day from their #5 (Woodson was actually 3rd best at this spot)
As a final note, no 2018 team had, what we'd call a "microscopic 1-5 time spread". No one had a spread under 20 seconds, and only one team had a spread under 30 seconds. Unfortunately for Menchville their 23 second spread did little to counteract a #1 finisher that scored 156 points.
We really hope you enjoyed reading these at least a quarter of the amount that we enjoyed writing them. If you made it this far, leave us a comment to let us know what you think!
We hope to bring you more How To Win guides in the very near future!
NOW THAT'S HOW TO TRACK!