Byron Center Track and Field 2022 Preview #1
We are 68 days away from MHSAA spring sports starting, and I’m going to write a bit in the leadup. Every coach should have reasons to feel good leading into the season, but I have a bunch this year. It’s my 4th year as head coach, which means my first freshmen class are seniors now. Seeing them buy in and become awesome people in addition to their athletic growth is incredibly rewarding. Being in the school now makes that growth even more visible, and makes the culture that much easier to nurture. One of the things I’m proud of is the lack of attrition we’ve seen with this class. There are only a handful of people that ran, jumped, or threw as freshmen in 2019 who aren’t here now. One of my goals as a coach is to provide an experience for highschoolers which leaves them saying “I’m glad I chose to do that.”
Last year was our first in a new conference after realignment in OK (Ottawa-Kent) land. We fared well, finishing 4th. On the boys side, we only had 3 seniors score at the conference meet, which is not ideal. But, we had 11th and 10th graders place highly in nearly every event. Grand Rapids Christian ran away with the conference meet with 148 points. The closest team was Lowell with 97 points, followed by Greenville at 81, and us (Byron Center) with 76. Christian High had dudes pretty much everywhere.
On the girls side, we also had only 3 seniors score points, but we lack some depth and only managed to finish 6th.
The job over my first few years here has been to teach this team how to succeed, what it really takes in Track and Field, and that is year round attention to the sport and constant speed development. That’s happening, and the results are starting to show. The girls have an uphill battle because East Grand Rapids and Forest Hills Central are very deep right now, but our boys team should be a contender.
Quantifying these things is possible though. Half because I’m curious about where we should stack up and half because we need more MHSAA T&F #content in general, I decided to try to put some numbers on it.
Early on in COVID, everybody tried something new. I decided to learn python. I could use excel sheets to do all this math, but what I really want to do is grab results data from athletic.net over and over and do the same math a bunch of times. So I wrote a few scripts to do the following:
Clean the data up, get rid of some of the junk that comes along with copying and pasting from athletic
Score everything
Add scores up by team, event, grade, gender
After that, I wanted to use previous years data to project forward. To do this, I removed all the 12th graders, rescored everything, and added it all up.
Here’s a link to the google sheet 2021 OK White Score Totals
A few notes about how scoring works and what I did with it
The OK White currently runs double-dual meets (Quads) where there are 4 teams, but you score two different contests per team during each meet. For example, at meet 1, Byron Center, Greenville, and Lowell travel to Christian High. We score a contest vs Greenville and another at the same time vs Lowell. We run in the same races against Christian High, but we don’t score against them.
Each team runs at 3 Quads, and then one final Dual against whatever team you haven’t scored against yet.
Each contest in those meets uses standard NFHS 5-3-1 scoring. At our conference meet we use 10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1. We also have a JV conference meet which scores like the conference meet.
I didn’t add these scores up using 5-3-1. I went straight championship scoring (8 team). I haven’t worked out how to program the double dual scoring, and I’m not going to add it up by hand right now. But I’m curious what changes, so I’ll figure it out sometime before the season starts.
I don’t know how/why, but Greenville didn’t participate in two of their Quad meets, so their scores are not fully representative of their team.
I left relay scores in there for now, even though presumably, the relays are senior heavy.
One of the things I love about coaching track is that you’ve got Boys and Girls together. They don’t score together, but what if they did? The first column in the first table shows the boys and girls scores added up. We rolled in at 3rd by that metric, first for boys only, and 4th for girls only.
Obviously a lot of time has passed between last spring and this spring. Some teams could have a monster freshman class with instant contributors (that’s one of the next things on my list), or some senior who never ran before could come out and throw some times down, like Lauren Armstrong did for us last year. Injuries happen, kids quit, or development halts. But the data is still relevant, and I think it’s helpful to show the team what they can be capable of. I’ll come back and dig into these numbers deeper as we get closer to the season, as well as do this same analysis for regionals.
