Brooke Starn may have graduated, but Meredith Corda is back to lead the Mustangs, and she has a solid top 5 behind her.
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 might think that results in the 1600 during track season have all that much to do with cross country success, but you would be wrong - there is a strong correlation between teams that produce lots of strong milers in the spring and teams that do well in the fall. That's why I think Monte Vista will be significantly better than their returning cross country times, which place them 22nd in the state. The Mustangs have the 7th-best returning team 1600 results in California this year, led by a 4:49 from Meredith Corda. Of course, it always hurts to lose a runner like Brooke Starn to graduation, but then again she was one of only 2 seniors on Monte Vista's 2015 squad that finished 5th in Division 1 (and the only one gone from the top 5). If rising junior Audrey Coney joins her sister in the top 5 (she clocked 5:07 for the 1600 after sitting out the fall season), the Mustangs will have a formidable scoring group. The only thing that keeps me from putting them in the top 15 is the question of depth - this team had a pretty significant drop-off after the 5th returner from last fall. If that problem gets solved in the summer, look out for another top 5 finish this season!
Ranking Data:
- Returning Team Ranking: 22nd (5K)
- Combined Spring Track Ranking: 14th (21st 3200, 7th 1600)
- Improvement Rating: 29th
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"