In the absence of both the NCAA Basketball Tournament and high school track's spring outdoor season, we decided to blend them together and hold a 32-team virtual tournament to see who is the best boys and girls virtual track teams in the state.
Inspired on Selection Sunday, we present March Madness Monday!
Process
Teams were ranked 1-32 based primarily on power rankings of 2020 results. Teams were then placed in a bracket format where No. 1 will be matched against No. 32, No. 2 with No. 31, etc. We'll use the Virtual Meet tool on the MileSplit website to run each of the matchups. We'll post each result in a separate article so that you can see both the breakdown by event but also by time per event category.
We'll publish a couple of events each day, at least one per gender, until we have winners for both the boys and girls tournaments.
All results will be tagged to the following series: March Madness Virtual Meet Tournament.
Format
Meets will be scored head-to-head based on traditional dual meet scoring of 5-3-1 for individuals and 5-0 for relays. Athletes will only be allowed to score in four events and teams are capped at three athletes per event. The Virtual Meet program applies these rules when scoring the meet.
Missing Results
Our virtual dual meet tournament is based solely on results from the first couple weeks of the 2020 outdoor season that are in the MileSplitCA database. If meet results are missing from the database, please email a link to those results to our stats team at results@milesplit.com. Dual meets that have been posted will not be rescored.
Also ...
A couple things to keep in mind. The power rankings used to guide our seeding process may not hold up in a head-to-head dual meet format. March Madness upsets, you say? You betcha!!
Because of that, teams on the bubble -- bottom 3-4 -- were subjective selections based on multiple athletes over one strong single athlete or relay team.
We are limited only to results in the database from just the first three weeks of the 2020 outdoor season, so expect to see some outlier situations where virtual meet competition may in no way reflect reality.
That said, we miss track and are doing this as a way to provide recognition to teams and athletes whose 2020 outdoor season may very well be over.
On the following pages are girls and boys top-50 teams based on our power rankings. The 32 teams for our tournament were selected from this group, again, primarily in order with some alterations among teams in the 28-32 ranking bubble.
