Hard to fathom, but we’re a month out from Regionals. Championship Season is coming soon, starting this week with the Battle Creek City Meet, Berrien County, then next week with Oakland County and Wayne County, advancing further on with our many area and conference championships. The weather is beginning to turn, mornings becoming cooler, leaves transforming into their beautiful fall hues, and most important – times are quickening and competition is heating up.
Given this juncture, time for another look at the regional projections. These follow many of the same rules as the division rankings. Using an individual’s races from here, a total rating is created by taking the top 75% of a runner’s races and weighing them toward more recent meets. Those ratings are then ranked for each region/division, spitting out a score that is used for the rankings. One added factor this week – filtering out athletes that haven’t competed over the past month, which I sadly have to assume are injured or no longer competing.
These might be much different than the athletic.net hypothetical meet. Anet uses the best performance from the season. I take more races into account, as I feel the entire resume speaks a greater volume about someone. Anet uses jamborees and duals, for which I don’t have time to calculate. Anet doesn’t account for course differences. If you take the 160 boys that ran at both Holly and Jackson, on average the Jackson times were 30 seconds faster. We have great coaches in this state that promote week-to-week improvement, but clearly there are differences in courses (and there are short/questionable ones too)! I’m not saying one is better than the other, just that I prefer my own and my bet is that they’ll be more accurate when we do this again next month.
Come Regional Week, if I don’t start these on a Sunday, somebody please donate an endless supply of caffeine via IV. That revelation is half the reason I do this here, so I know what work is needed when the real regional previews come. Enjoy this week before and the first half of #ChampionshipSeason.
Michigan XC Speed Ratings 
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