Only Half As Great As It Could Be

Reprinted from Minnesota Running & Track, December 2006-February 2007 issue ...

Editor’s Comment
By Charlie Mahler

If you lingered over the photos on the preceding pages, those that document the 2006 Minnesota State High School League State Cross Country Championships, and if you have a soft spot in your heart for young men and women giving it their endurance all like I do, you probably feel good about the state of our sport at the high school level in Minnesota. Minnesota high school distance running is experiencing a renaissance, a new golden era, and the shimmering fall day that was the backdrop to the State Meet left a nice glow.

It might make me somewhat the curmudgeon, then, to note that, in the Boys Class AA meet, roughly half of the best teams in the state weren’t competing in the meet designed, supposedly, to have the best competing against the best. Of the top 13 large school teams, according to the Coaches’ Association poll taken after the Section meets, only seven competed at State. Half a dozen of the best large school teams in Minnesota contented themselves, or tried to anyway, by watching the meet from the sidelines, perhaps cheering on a lonely teammate that made the meet individually. While the hole in the meet was less pronounced for Class AA girls, the polls said they too had four fewer contending teams than they should have.

The wrench in the machinery is the MSHSL’s qualifying procedure. Their neat-and-tidy, two-schools-from-each-of-eight-sections qualifying procedure made a mess of the State Meet this year. What’s clean and simple for administrators and meet directors is a messy and hard-to-take when it comes to the athletes and coaches who sweat it out all year in the effort to run fast and see how they stack up. The geometric symmetry of an equal number of team qualifying from the state’s sections fails to account for the fact that strong teams often cluster.

Take Section 6AA as a stunning example. To borrow a soccer term, 6AA is Minnesota’s “Section of Death.” When the gun fired for the boys Section 6AA meet at Gale Woods, the #2, #3, #4, #5, and #8 ranked teams in the state found themselves racing for the section’s two State Meet slots. At the finish line, #2 ranked Wayzata didn’t earn a trip to Northfield because their 85 point tally put them behind Eden Prairie and Rosemount which scored 74 and 76, respectively. Number five ranked Hopkins (4th in the meet) and #8 ranked Edina (5th) were similarly out of luck. So too, Burnsville – they were unranked coming into the meet but pollsters ranked them #11 in the state on the merits of their 6th place finish in 6AA.

The teams that survived 6AA only made the section look stronger by their performances at State: Rosemount finished second, Eden Prairie was third!

Is there a perfect system for qualifying the best sixteen teams from across Minnesota to the State Meet? No. But there are two good ones. Currently, the NCAA, which is faced with a similar challenge as the MSHSL’s, selects its national meet fields with an equal number of automatic qualifiers from each of its regions and supplements them with committee-selected, at-large qualifiers in an attempt to place all the deserving teams, no matter their region of origin, on the starting line. Previously, some divisions of the NCAA awarded qualifying spots to regions based on how well teams from given region performed at the previous year’s national meet. Neither system is perfect: selectors can make human errors or be biased; regional strength may migrate from one year to the next. Still, either system would be an improvement upon that in place now for Minnesota high schoolers.

My hope is that school and High School League administrators will roll up their sleeves and work hard at designing a qualifying system that’s as good as the athletes and teams in Minnesota are. I want that golden feeling from the State Meet to last, even as I read my way down the results sheet.