We converted times from various courses to their equivalents at Woodward Park, and it makes for an interesting top 25 to wrap up 2015
One of the biggest problems with a statistics-based approach during cross country season is the validity of comparisons between courses. That's especially true in California, where we have a greater-than-usual variety of geography, not to mention the wide variation in course distances. That makes straight statistical rankings suspect, even if they are still interesting to look at.
To try to combat those discrepancies, I turned to the Course Converter Tool created by Lynbrook High School and updated by Hank Lawson. I took the top performances from the state's best runners and converted them to their equivalent times at Woodward Park. Once they were all (theoretically) equalized for distance and course difficulty, I looked through the performances for each athlete to see which was the fastest. It leads to an interesting list, a little bit different way of looking at the times. Hopefully, this will help me with future subjective rankings, too.
A few notes:
- There are still obvious problems with comparing these performances which cannot be corrected by this method (weather and course conditions being the two most glaring ones).
- I only used courses that were in our 3 Mile or 5K rankings (one exception: for the girls, I included the 2.75-mile Balboa Park course). For example, Phillip Rocha's race at Santa Anita, any races at Cerritos Regional Park, or Austin Tamagno's race at
- I only included each athlete's top performance on each course, if run more than once.
- The Lynbrook course converter only has comparisons for the state's major courses, so there were a few athletes whose PR's could not be converted this way.
- I also had to adjust the settings for Balboa Park, which the Lynbrook tool only lists at 2.95 miles and grades easier than Woodward Park.
- Finally, this is a list of the top SINGLE PERFORMANCES only - which allows for some outstanding one-day races to make the list even if the athlete may not have equaled the performance at other meets. It is NOT intended to be a ranking based on the entire season's body of work for each runner.
With those disclaimers out of the way, let's look at the list of top performances: