Bringing Apples & Oranges Together

Tim Fulton Photo

It’s been more than a decade since an environmental scientist from the Syracuse area started a website designed to ‘rate’ cross country runners in Section 3, one of 11 regions encompass the New York high school athletic association.

Soon Bill Meylan was ranking the entire state, which required knowledge about the course, the conditions and the runners in comparison with one another. Now his website, TullyRunners.com, is a frequent stop to see results ‘normalized’ by his speed ratings.

Mitch Kastoff, a runner from Valley Stream, N.Y., was one of Meylan’s loyal followers. He wound up being one of the guys who got screwed by the University of Delaware when it unceremoniously dropped men’s track.

Thankfully, that didn’t turn him off from the sport. In fact, he has introduced Meylan-type analysis to Flotrack and now we have, for the first time ever, FloRatings.

Here’s a look at the leader and the Ivy runners in the top 150 (out of more than 1,500). I’d say that the ratings aren’t yet perfect (there are unattached runners in there, including a high schooler), but they will certainly continue to improve, just as Meylan’s system did a decade ago.

Take a look:

Men

Women

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012 at 9:54 pm. It is filed under Athletes, Spotlight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.