Running the Numbers for Great State Expectations

Track athletes spend more than two months in development and compete in up to ten fairly major meets before they hit States. During that period they may occasionally have those perfect conditions that help them set some mind-boggling PR against super competition at a Penn Relays, Loucks Games, or county or class championship. A team may be able to pull together four dedicated fresh sets of legs for a relay time that they will have a hard time matching again. At States, a premier sprinter on a top team may be asked to not only give his or her best for trials, class finals, and championship races in the 100m and 200m but also anchor a 4x100 relay team during an exhausting two days. And the conditions at States frequently seem to include a scorcher day or one out of the monsoon season.

So considering all the potential for times and distances to be well short of the mark set at earlier meets, can we really expect most of the winners to have those jaw-dropping results that leave the season's previous top marks in the dust? Can the super competition at States push the athletes to go to infinity and beyond?

What do the results from the 2015 meet at SUNY Albany tell us about what to expect? Note that we are only measuring the hotness of States by the season's action and not by any reference to the feats of all the legends who have written the record books for decades of past state championships. That would be really unfair, though last year's meet did contribute four new meet records with the 400m record going down to Izaiah Brown of Amsterdam for the boys and Sammy Watson of Rush-Henrietta for the girls, Suffern's Kamryn McIntosh knocked out the girls 800m mark, and Jack Jibb of Monroe-Woodbury shattered the 3000m Steeplechase record. So last year's States was no slouch.

The quest for an answer to the expectations question requires us to give the hardworking athletes a fair deal about the marks. If an athlete sets a meet record on Friday in a D1 class championship, and then on Saturday decides to coast home with a more subdued time in the overall championship, she is credited with her better time. And the top States mark may not be set by the pre-meet favorite, but that top seed is the mark used for deciding whether the meet's action got red hot or remained lukewarm.

I hoped to come up with a neat little evaluation system complete with capsaicin pepper icons to indicate which events saw super hot leaps at States last year to predict this year's expected torrid zones, but unfortunately or maybe luckily, track and field just doesn't work that way. As indicated by its full name, it is really two very different sports. The running events in track are founded on contests where athletes are battling within a fairly narrow range of personal performances, and for many the States meet may be their big opportunity to bust out in their one race after a season in which they often needed to save something up for another event. The chances for greatly bettering the top seed time may not be huge even when you set a meet record, but unless the weather is atrocious as in the 2012 States, the majority of running events are poised for winners to go at least a little under the pre-meet topper.

The field events are very different, subjected to potentially huge swings either way against the season's NY #1, but generally the trend appears to be downward. Probably the main reason for this is that the field athletes (especially the throwers and horizontal jumpers) spend much of season making dozens of forays into the ring or down the runway where at any moment they can bust the big one. Even if conditions are perfect at States, it is never easy for the long jump winner to match his or her season's best of a hundred jumps with one of the twelve D1 and Championship jumps that likely include a bunch of fouls. The field contests are also a bit more of a solo act than the running events. The discus thrower does not have competitor physically nipping at his heels when he's in the ring; he's just letting it fly and then digesting the numbers as they get called out. The vertical jumpers will have the best chance because their action is the culmination of a series of winnowing-out stages that gradually reduces the action down to often a one-on-one duel.

So yeah, if the weather is fairly ideal on Friday and Saturday in Syracuse as now predicted, based on last year's action we may see the season's best track times being largely exceeded at States, in the most extreme cases by up to around 2.5%. The field events possibly may see some big efforts if conditions are wonderful, but last year only one of the seven field contests (LJ, TJ, HJ, PV, shot put, discus, and throw in the pentathlon) had a boost at States on the girls' side, while the boys had increases on four.

For the girls, 8 of the 19 events had leaps over the pre-meet best by the winner either in the D1 or Championship contest. The five running events stretching from the 200m to the 3000m all had boosts, along with the 400m hurdles and the 4x400 relay. The high jump was the lone field event that saw the bar get pushed to greater heights, and the boost was indeed the highest of all the events with Archbishop Molloy's Sarah Kowpak getting a 2.22% leap over the pre-meet best. Two meet records by Sammy Watson and Kamryn McIntosh in the 400m and 800m did beat the previous NY #1, but they were competing against their own marks so their increases were by less than 1% in the more sedate track events. Watson did get one of the two biggest jumps in the running events with her 1.99% improvement of the 1500m tops, equaling Paul Robeson's Alyssa Sandy's same limit buster in the 400m hurdles. The four running events on the red side of the percentages were all less than 1.2% off the mark, but in the field events, both the discus and long jump lagged far behind the NY #1 with decreases of more than 6%.

The guys' story had a rosier glow to it, as all but one of the twelve running events topped the pre-meet top seed. Meet records by Izaiah Brown in the 400m and Jack Jibb in the 3K steeplchase did exceed by 1.53% and 1.68% respectively, but the biggest leaps among the track events came in the 200m with a 2.56% boost for Newburgh's Zack Warden in his D1 win, and Infinite Tucker pushed his personal pre-meet best down another 1.62% in the 400m hurdles. The one negative track results came during a very strategic 3200m contest, but as one FM dad noted, "Just win, baby!" The two biggest leaps for the guys came in those more volatile field events, as Maine-Endwell's Mike Palmer ran the pentathlon score up by 4.05%, and North Rockland's Eric Favors showed up his earlier season performances by heaving the shot put 2.80% further. As on the girls' side, the biggest decreases came in the discus and long jump, as the two big favorites couldn't quite match the huge efforts of earlier in the season.