A strong track season and a history of year-to-year improvement both say that the Mavericks will be better than their returning numbers indicate.
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.
You know which section is the hardest to predict in the preseason, especially for girls' competition? The San Diego Section, because the girls run 2.7 miles in their section races, and therefore those times don't show in returning 3 Mile of 5K rankings. That's why a team like La Costa Canyon can be hard to place. The Mavericks clearly belong in the top 25 - they had the 11th-best returning team 1600 and 3200 results from the spring, and they have the 8th-best record of year-to-year improvement. Making things even more complicated, LCC had 4 seniors in their top 7 last year, so they don't register on returning reports from the section finals or the state meet. The Mavericks do return their top 3 runners from their section final (top 2 from the state meet), and the program is deep, so this is a bet that they will develop the 4-7 runners they need to return to the state meet and place high again. Will that be as high as their 2nd-place finish in Division 3 from 2015? Only time will tell.
Ranking Data:
- Returning Team Ranking: 34th
- Combined Spring Track Ranking: 11th
- Improvement Rating: 8th
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"