Memo: Cross Country 2006 ...
What TullyRunners Will & Won't be Doing This XC Season

Bill Meylan (August 26, 2006)

Information About New York State Team Rankings for 2006 ... Dan Doherty (coach at Pearl River) and Tom Cuffe (coach at Monsignor Farrell) have done an outstanding job ranking the NY girl's and boy's teams over the past years ... Dan Doherty will continue to rank the girls this coming season and Tom Cuffe will continue to rank the boys.

In recent years, I posted these rankings on TullyRunners because Dan and Tom generously sent them to me on a weekly basis. This year, Dan and Tom have been hired by the ArmoryFoundation web-site to produce the rankings for the Armory on an exclusive basis ... This means the NY team rankings will be posted only on the Armory web-site ... Other web-sites (such as TullyRunners) will simply provide an Internet link to the rankings on Armory.

This is a good development for several reasons ... (1) it consolidates exactly where the NY team rankings are coming from and where to find them ... (2) it allows Dan and Tom to receive some much-deserved compensation ... and (3) it will save me some time in maintaining the TullyRunners web-site which is discussed below.

Tom Cuffe has also been hired as the new NTN Northeast editor ... Tom's experience in ranking NY teams and coaching makes him an excellent choice for the job ... additional information about Tom is available on the Armory.

TullyRunners - XC Coverage 2006

Summary

TullyRunners will be cutting back on the individual rankings and XC databases ... Exactly how much will be determined as the season progresses ... Time demands have become burdensome ... It is either cut back or stop altogether.

Some Background

TullyRunners.com began Internet posting in the year 2000. TullyRunners was started to cover NY State Section 3 high school cross country ... what many people may not realize, I intended to cover only the girls ... I spend most of my time at practices and meets helping Tully Girl's Coach Michelle Rauber (formerly Michelle Franklin). Michelle ran for Coach Jack Daniels at Cortland State ... in addition to being a member of Cortland's NCAA Division III XC championship teams, she won several individual NCAA DIII track championships (1500m - 10K).

As fate would have it, the Tully Boys appeared to have a team capable of contending for the 2000 State Class D title. No Tully team had won a State team title in any sport up to this point ... that's important because I'm a Tully graduate (the Tully girls lost to Bronxville by 2 points at the 1999 State Meet at Westchester CC , but Bronxville had the Mullins twins). I met Tully Boy's Coach Jim Paccia in 1983 when he came to Tully to teach and coach cross country (with some rather innovative methods) ... So I decided to cover the Section 3 Boys on-line despite the additional time requirements involved (this is the only reason TullyRunners began posting information concerning boy's XC) ... The Tully Boys won the 2000 State title (and this was the year before Lopez Lomong came to Tully) ... Guess why I covered the boys in the next three years!

Since my own running background is primarily track & field (pole vaulting, jumping and the decathlon), I decided to cover track & field ... first at the sectional level, then state-wide ... This obviously added to the time requirements necessary to maintain the TullyRunners web-site, but initially, it was not overly demanding.

For some crazy reason, I decided to expand the cross country coverage to the entire State ... first to all eleven sections of the public high schools, and then to the CHSAA. The reason is actually straightforward ... The only way to show how the Section 3 runners stack-up against the competition is to show how well the competition is running ... and cross country has become a cross-sectional sport in NY State. I had been maintaining data on state-wide runners for a number of years (for my own purposes), but not in formalized manner for Internet presentation ... also, I had been limiting it to just some better teams and runners, or runners that Tully (or other select Section 3 teams) might compete against at the State Meet.

I knew the decision to expand coverage to the entire State (and actually present it on the Internet in a decent manner) would require additional time and effort ... and I knew it might be substantial ... but it was really just an experiment with no long-term planning.

From the start, I knew I under-estimated the time requirements ... As I added more teams and runners, I knew I badly under-estimated the time requirements.

I look forward to cross country season (practices with girls, the meets and the championship races) ... But last year, I dreaded the start of the invitational race season knowing how much time I would be spending "not having a life". Some web-site viewers may remember one XC weekend last year when "less than normal" was being done ... in the middle of one Sunday afternoon, I decide that was it, I'm closing the web-site so I can enjoy the XC season as a fan for a change ... but I'm crazy, so I decided to continue (at least for the 2005 season).

At the end of the 2006 outdoor track season, I was really really dreading the start of the 2006 XC invitational season and how much time I would be spending "not having a life". During the XC season, I spend a minimum of 50 hours per week doing strictly TullyRunners web-site stuff and related stuff ... and that's in addition to my "real" job as an environmental scientist and the time I spend at practices and meets. I'm getting older and the late nights in front of the computer screen are no longer fun ... I truly enjoy a good chunk of what I do on TullyRunners because I'm really doing it for myself (these are things I'm interested in), but there's a point when the time and effort are just too much...

So in June 2006, I decided to close the TullyRunners.com web-site (actually stop maintaining it would be more accurate) ... BUT summer is the "slow" time ... and when runners and parents kept asking for the pre-season profiles, I started doing them one group at a time ... I also evaluated some out-of-state XC races for speed ratings when asked (but I had an interest in that up to a point). Updating the XC Schedule is easy, informative and very worthwhile ... I have never minded doing that or simply posting results.

What Now?

I promised Coach Rauber to keep making speed ratings for her (even though she's eight months pregnant, still faster than me, and likely to hurt me if I don't ).

But to continue updating the databases and posting weekly rankings for individual runners requires some changes that save time ... Unfortunately, that means excluding some races and runners from consideration.

The most time-consuming operation is uploading race results into a database ... It might seem simple, but it is NOT ... It is absolutely essential for the uploaded data to be in an exact, specific format ... Runner names and School names MUST be exact matches for what already exists in the database. Properly formatted electronic race results help a great deal ... and by that I mean results from commercial timing companies such as LeoneTiming and FinishRight or results from commercial programs such as Hy-Tek Meet Manager or Run-Score ... but I still need to re-format these to some degree for my purposes because there is NO uniformity in reporting race results ... and making them uniform is a very time-demanding process because in 2005 I was keeping track of 1382 boys and 1360 girls.

It's my own fault for expanding the coverage that much ... But to continue, I need to implement some Time Savers:

Time Saver #1 ... I will NOT consider ANY results unless they exist in a usable electronic format ... Faxes, printed sheets or hardcopy newspaper results will be ignored ... PDF files will be ignored unless I can open and manipulate them with my existing software ... and this also pertains to me posting results (if it takes me a long time to put them in a format I can use, I will not post the results).

Time Saver #2 ... I will NOT consider ANY results that require long periods of time to speed rate the race ... No more going back to collect additional data so I can rate the race with acceptable accuracy ... Also, if the results are not deep enough, I will not attempt to rate the race or put the results in the database.

Time Saver #3 ... I am placing limits on the amount of time I spend looking for results ... IF the results of specific races are not available in a timely manner, then they go to the back of the queue ... if I don't have time to use them (which will probably be the following week), they will be ignored ... I will NOT begin using (formatting, uploading, rating) ANY results after early Sunday evening for consideration that week.

Time Saver #4 ... Ignore all out-of-state races UNLESS they include NY runners that need to be rated ... Right now, the ONLY out-of-State races I might consider are the McDonald's Maymont VA Invitational (only because Tully is going) and the Brown Invitational ... maybe the Great American (because Collegiate and BRD are going).

Time Saver #5 ... Forget that NTN exists until the NY Federation meet is over and the NTN Selection Committee makes their final choices! .... I know, that's a tough one to follow ... Wonder how much time I would gain by ignoring the Internet message boards??

Possible Time Saver ... Ignore the Manhattan Invitational ... I appreciate the heroic efforts of the Armory folks that generate the available results, but that should never be happening for a major invitational. For comparison, look at the results for the New Jersey Shore Coaches Invitational at Holmdel Park ... New Jersey does it right - Manhattan does it wrong ... I am amazed that coaches actually accept the Manhattan results, so apparently they think it's OK - I do NOT ... Last year I got 27 e-mails from coaches and runners outlining omissions or mistakes in the results (wrong times, wrong places, wrong runners, runners skipped putting other runners out-of-place, etc), and it happens year after year ... How many teams have competed at Manhattan and didn't know their team score and placing at the end? (apparently coaches think that's OK ... hey, it's a nice over-night trip) ... This year I may rate ONLY the Girls Eastern State Championship (IF the results go deep enough and there are no mistakes) ... IF there weren't so many 2.5-mile races at VCP, I would ignore all 2.5-mile races, and I am considering that! ... Sooner or later, runners will run a real 5K race (if it's later, so be it).

For my purposes this year, the most important races are the sectional championship races (not States, not Feds, not NTN) ... If those are the only results I use, so be it ... and if some sections don't have results, it won't matter.

Even with these time-saving limitations, the vast majority of individual runners that belong on my ranking lists will be there at some point in time ... It may be later than sooner, but that doesn't bother me anymore.

Also ... There will be at least two (maybe three) weekends where I will be traveling on Sundays for business trips ... And that will delay anything web-related.