Track and Field Divisions?

Testing said:
Jesus how much of an endowment is this professor getting to write a paper on a study that more athletes to pick from improves your chances of getting elite athletes, here I will save you the time of reading the paper,,,,it does
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Endowment? How much do you think it costs to do something like this? There is not much direct cost other than the time it takes To collect and analyze the data. On the scale of such projects, it is a tiny data set. it is just a side project he undertook at the request of someone else, and the goal is to quantify the effect of population. That is an interesting question. Whether it has an effect is not. Actually, it is a pretty cool data analytics project. Trying to find ways to control for effects of a wide variety of confounding variables is interesting if you are interested in analytics. All the more so if the area being studied is also interesting. I am thinking of trying to find something similar to do with my students.
 
It's well-known that as a college professor it's "publish or perish". Universities pat their own backs vs. others by the numbers of papers their respective staffs publish. After all, gentlemen, they've got to protect their phoney-baloney jobs! (another Mel Brooks famous liner)
 
mathking said:
It is not necessarily the very largest schools winning every year, but if you look at the winners and runners up in D1 the list tends toward the largest schools. It is even more telling if you look at the top five teams year by year.

I know a college professor/runner/track&XC parent who is working on a paper analyzing the effect of school size on cross country. I have seen an alpha version of his analysis and it is very clear that school size is a huge factor. No one is arguing, for either sport, that having a big school is a sufficient condition for having a good team. But it is pretty clear that it is a dominant factor.

I coach at Coffman, which is ranked somewhere in the mid 30s in school size for boys, a little over half the enrollment of Mason and mid 40s with half of Mason's enrollment for girls. Taylor's enrollment is proportionally much closer to ours than the bottom schools are to the top schools in D1. In the last dozen or so years, how many years did Taylor have a track team that could beat Coffman's for boys or girls? Not very many. Same thing with XC. I would NEVER argue that I am a better coach or that we have a better coaching staff than Taylor. We have a lot more students.
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I wonder how the study will determine if the better coaches gravitate towards the bigger schools so they have more numbers to work with? Once you combine a top coach with a very large school you have success. There are schools near the top of the enrollment list that never show well at the state meet. Must be a reason for that. Once again, adding a forth division won’t change what people are complaining about here. It will only change the name of the schools at the bottom of D1 that are overmatched by school size. Unless D1 is a division of only 20 or so mega-schools.
 
yj_runfan said:
I wonder how the study will determine if the better coaches gravitate towards the bigger schools so they have more numbers to work with? Once you combine a top coach with a very large school you have success. There are schools near the top of the enrollment list that never show well at the state meet. Must be a reason for that. Once again, adding a forth division won’t change what people are complaining about here. It will only change the name of the schools at the bottom of D1 that are overmatched by school size. Unless D1 is a division of only 20 or so mega-schools.
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If XC were divided up with about about half as many teams in the top division as in the other three divisions (and note it would still have more students than the bottom two divisions) then the relative size disparities would be much less.

You would still have them in the smallest division, but there is no way to avoid that with the schools that really small enrollments, and those disparities are significantly offset by the lack of football teams (and very limited number of fall sports offered) for those schools.
 
mathking said:
If XC were divided up with about about half as many teams in the top division as in the other three divisions (and note it would still have more students than the bottom two divisions) then the relative size disparities would be much less.

You would still have them in the smallest division, but there is no way to avoid that with the schools that really small enrollments, and those disparities are significantly offset by the lack of football teams (and very limited number of fall sports offered) for those schools.
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What would be the size difference between the top and bottom teams in that new D1? That’s the biggest complaint I see here.
 
yj_runfan said:
What would be the size difference between the top and bottom teams in that new D1? That’s the biggest complaint I see here.
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If they went with 'even' numbers of teams in each division... massive. For discussion purposes (and no, I didn't take the time to parse out every detail - who put 9 kids on the line, Etc.), an even distribution across 4 boys divisions roughly sees 1 (Mason 1300 - Harvey 342), 2 (Norwalk 341 - Brookville 188), 3 (Keystone 187 - Col. Crawford 111), and 4 (Shenandoah 111 on down). So the largest school would be almost 4 times the size of the smallest school in Division 1.

Perrysburg, the 57th school in terms of size statewide for boys (649), is half of Mason's 1300 enrolled males.

Hoover, the 100th school in terms of boys size (499), is 2 1/2 times smaller.

It appears that if they wished to address enrollment disparity, they would almost have to unbalance the 4 divisions (like football has done with Division 1 in their 7 divisions).
 
tmk said:
If they went with 'even' numbers of teams in each division... massive. For discussion purposes (and no, I didn't take the time to parse out every detail - who put 9 kids on the line, Etc.), an even distribution across 4 boys divisions roughly sees 1 (Mason 1300 - Harvey 342), 2 (Norwalk 341 - Brookville 188), 3 (Keystone 187 - Col. Crawford 111), and 4 (Shenandoah 111 on down). So the largest school would be almost 4 times the size of the smallest school in Division 1.

Perrysburg, the 57th school in terms of size statewide for boys (649), is half of Mason's 1300 enrolled males.

Hoover, the 100th school in terms of boys size (499), is 2 1/2 times smaller.

It appears that if they wished to address enrollment disparity, they would almost have to unbalance the 4 divisions (like football has done with Division 1 in their 7 divisions).
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Those numbers don't seem right. So if CC went to 4 division there would be 140 teams in each, If Hoover at 499 is 100th biggest that have a CC team I find it hard to believe that there is only 40 schools out of the 100 that have enrollment between Hoover and Harvey have CC.
 
Please be aware. There has NOT been any talk about going to 4 divisions for cross country. Never…. Not even close to any validity for having 4 division. Closer to going back to 2 divisions (especially for girls) than moving to 4. This entire thread is for track and field only!
 
ENA2 said:
Please be aware. There has NOT been any talk about going to 4 divisions for cross country. Never…. Not even close to any validity for having 4 division. Closer to going back to 2 divisions (especially for girls) than moving to 4. This entire thread is for track and field only!
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I agree 4 is not happen in CC and girls certainly trending toward 2.

So to get it back to track if Track split to an even 4 divisions would be about 155 in each that cut off would most likely be Western Brown with enrollment of 353. Currently the smallest is Oakwood at 284.
 
ENA2 said:
Please be aware. There has NOT been any talk about going to 4 divisions for cross country. Never…. Not even close to any validity for having 4 division. Closer to going back to 2 divisions (especially for girls) than moving to 4. This entire thread is for track and field only!
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YES. YES. YES.
 
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