Tutorial: Winter Season Rankings Explained

The difference is in the lean: sprinters have to work harder to run indoor curves (and there are twice as many of them), and that has a significant effect on times in the 300 and 500.

Due to a wave of questions and an updated interface, I think this is an excellent time to provide a little tutorial on how the NCRunners rankings work during the winter season.  We'll start with the basics, and then discuss some of the more sophisticated options available to Insiders.

"Indoor" vs. "Winter"

If you're from North Carolina, the "Polar Bear" system of qualifying for the Indoor State Championship probably seems normal.  If you're from almost anywhere else, though, it seems exceedingly strange.  That's because "Indoor Track" actually means running indoors ONLY in most of the country; only North Carolina and Virginia make heavy use of outdoor meets during the winter.  

Because of that, NCRunners faces conflicting obligations during the season.  On the one hand, we have to report and rank all the performances that come in from our state, so that the entries to the state meet will be accurate and the process will go smoothly.  On the other hand, NCRunners is part of the national MileSplit network, and the performances we enter feed into the overall US rankings, which are almost exclusively indoor-only.

Why is that so important?  Well, there can be a huge difference between performances indoors and outdoors, primarily because of the tightness and frequency of the curves.  And indoor 200m track has very tight curves that slow runners down, and in every "oval race" the athletes have to run twice as many curves indoors as they do outdoors.  This effect is most pronounced in the 300 and 500, but it can even alter the times in the longer-distance races.  That's why we have a dual system of rankings, using the code words "winter" and "indoor:"

• Winter = outdoor ("polar bear") performances

• Indoor = true indoor performances only

1. Click on the Rankings button at the top of any NCRunners page
2. Click on the gender you want to view. 
3. This takes you to the leaderboard - which only displays INDOOR performances, to keep it in sync with all the other states that compete in indoor track.
4. If you click on one of the events from that leaderboard, then the default rankings are WINTER, and they will include all performances.  
5. Once you are in the rankings for a single event, if you only want to see INDOOR rankings, you can choose that from the drop-down menu on any rankings page.
6. If you're not sure which rankings you're viewing, check the URL at the top of the screen to see if it says "indoor" or "winter."  You can change this by hand if you want to switch from one to the other.

Examples:

• Girls Leaderboard

• Boys INDOOR 300 Dash Rankings

• Boys WINTER 300 Dash Rankings

Hand Times vs. FAT

In addition to indoor and outdoor performances, we have to distinguish between hand timing (using a hand-held stopwatch) and "fully automated timing" or FAT (in which a computer starts the clock instantly, and a video image is used to determine the exact time of the finish).  Hand times are notoriously inaccurate, because they bring the "human element" into play - not only do humans have a delayed reaction time compared to machines, but they are also capable of making mistakes (or of deliberately fudging the times, but that's another story entirely).

By rule, hand times must be rounded off to the next highest tenth of a second (humans are not accurate to the hundredth of a second, and neither are most stopwatches).  In addition, all hand times must have 0.24 added to them (to adjust for human reaction time) whenever they are being compared to FAT performances.  In reality, that really only makes a significant difference in the sprints.  For that reason, our system automatically adds the 0.24 to hand times in events of 400 meters or less, including the hurdles.

Example:

• Athlete runs 6.51 in the 55 Dash

• Time is rounded up to the next tenth = 6.6, and reported to NCRunners that way.

• Our system adds 0.24 = 6.84, which is how the performance is displayed.

Truthfully, the actual FAT time of the same performance would be even slower than that!  These procedures allow sprint races to be properly seeded when a combination of hand times and FAT are being used, such as at the state meet.

When you view the rankings, the default is to include all times - FAT and converted hand times.  However, you can exclude the hand times by changing the "Timing" drop-down to "FAT Only."