We just completed our Countdown to XC over the weekend, and I want to wrap that up by sharing with you one more aspect of the data used in that process. When determining the teams in the Countdown, I used three primary stats:
- Returning cross country rankings (5K and 3 Mile) from the 2018 fall season
- Returning team 1600 and 3200 rankings from the 2019 spring season
- Improvement Ratings
In this article, I will present the top 25 teams in my Improvement Ratings, for time periods of 3 years, 5 years, and 7 years. First, though, a brief explanation.
Improvement Ratings Explained
Improvement Rating is a custom metric I have developed over a period of years to evaluate the ability of a cross country program to make year-round progress. Simply put, it compares a team's yearly improvement to its place at the state meet:
- Improvement: calculated by comparing the team's final top 5 average time from a particular season to the returning top 5 average from the previous season (calculated for each year separ...
