Following Week of Saturday, September 24
The second week of the rankings comes after just a glorious weekend of racing that included not only the central focus of the McDaniel-Baxter Pre-States meet in centrally located Chenango Valley but also a wide ranging slate of top events around the state in Baldwinsville, in Utica for the EJ Herrmann, at Bowdoin, and at Sunken Meadows for Suffolk Coaches. Some teams also ventured out to RI for Ocean State, chased the lions and vice versa at Six Flags Wild Safari in NJ, or saw the Affolder brothers' new home down in Carlisle PA.
The races at the top of all four classes are extremely close and seem ready to stay that way for a long way down the road. As we moved firmly into the time of saying good bye to any expectations from last year and just crunching the numbers for this year, there were huge jumps, significant drops, and some total disappearances from the rankings lists as a few teams have not yet showed up with the expected troops this year. Some teams have still not run yet and have moved over to the Watching For list. A handful of teams were missing key runners at Pre-States and other meets and either dropped down or out of the rankings.
The Pre-States merge place for teams that ran at McDaniel-Baxter are displayed in brackets following the race result to show how the team stacked up against the other 91 teams that ran there. Differences between the placements for the individual races and the merge results can be large though, as West Seneca East finished one place and 24 points ahead of Brewster in Race 7, yet was four places and a huge 77 points behind in the merge.
Again, note that the TR Avg. is a team's average season's speed rating for its top five runners. It is not usually mirroring a runner's best score nor his most recent score unless he has only run one race this season, and the marks for a team's top runners are compiled from the Tully Runners Leaderboard. Among the factors used in creating the rankings are the recent meet results, team speed ratings, and depth and core-strength reviews. In some cases we also use a dual score result from pitting the two teams' speed ratings in a virtual head-to-head.
We move on to October for next week's rankings that will follow the mega-meet at McQuaid along with a nice selection of events at the Crusader Classic, St. Anthony's meet, Maine-Endwell, Beaver Run, Brewster, Grout, Auburn, John Killian, Whitesboro, and a lot of fun. Times flies, but not as fast as our runners.
Cheers to all.