Getting to the top is hard, but staying on top is even harder - that's why Broughton has the best Improvement Rating in the state.

You might have noticed a statistic called "Improvement Rating" being used in the Preseason XC Countdown.  The numbers refer to something I cooked up while researching the teams that were projected to be top 30 this upcoming season.  It's still a little rough (I've already thought of some ways to improve it for the future), but it boils down to this: which teams are truly the best at improving from year to year?  I hope this is just the first edition of what will be an ongoing feature here at NCRunners, and the methods used to determine the ratings are listed in the first section.  Or, you can...

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Methodology:

There are two factors that go into the Improvement Rating:

• The team's 5-person average time.  Specifically, the metric compares the projected average for a season ...