The Cougars can be counted on to be strong, and they return 6 of 7 from the team that finished 9th in Division 1.
Cross country is right around the corner, and we're celebrating by counting down to the start of the competitive fall season! Each day (except today!) we'll release one boys team and one girls team, counting down from 30 to 1 as we approach the beginning of real XC racing.
Ventura is in the spotlight on Day 28, and the Cougars were awfully hard to classify in these rankings. On the one hand, they rank 19th in the returning 5K and 20th in the returning 3 Mile. On the other hand, our Improvement Rating metric doesn't like their last 3 years very much, putting them 43rd out of the roughly 60 teams we evaluated. Ventura's track season was right in the middle, so that doesn't help us decide where to place them. Sophia Ramos ran under 5:10, with Tatiana Garcia and Danielle Askar both clocking sub-11:30, but the rest of their spring runners were a good ways back from those three. Will the Cougars solidify their depth and close their 4-5 and 6-7 gaps with a strong summer? Will Ventura advance from the ultra-competitive Southern Section Division 1 race to make the state meet again, with a chance to improve on their 9th-place finish from 2015? With 6 of seven returning from that squad, including 5 rising seniors, my bet is that they will.
Ranking Data:
- Returning Team Ranking: 19th
- Combined Spring Track Ranking: 31st (22nd 1600, 40th 3200)
- Improvement Rating: 43rd
The #CountdownToXC is a data-driven set of team rankings determined using the following information:
- Returning Team 5K & 3 Mile Rankings from 2015 XC: carries the most weight
- Returning Team 1600 and 3200 Rankings from 2015 Outdoor: less weight, but important
- Improvement Rating: a long-term statistical evaluation of how each program improves from season to season. This custom metric compares a team's final team average from each season to their returning team average from the previous season, while also accounting for how highly-ranked the team was. As we continue to improve the depth and quality of our data in California, this measure should get stronger and stronger. Improvement ratings will be the subject of a separate article in August.
- Returning team from the 2015 CIF state meet
- A little bit of "gut feeling"