Ed’s Ramblings - The Best (Ranked) in Cross Country

But ranking teams can be tricky...do you say the Yankees have the best baseball team in history because of their overall record or World Series appearances? What about combined batting averages? Most home runs in a year? There are lots of ways to rank your favorite team. And then, try to determine the best overall program through the history of the sport. The Yankees have made and won more World Series, and the Braves have the most consecutive playoff appearances.  But regardless, there is no one way to select. Having the teams of the past compete head-to-head is the only way to actually know and of course, this is an impossibility.

I have tried to do this with our South Carolina state champion cross country teams. And in this and two more articles leading up to this year's South Carolina High School League Cross State Championships, I will reveal my statistically proven choices determined by multiple ways. I will limit this to the top 25 in each method, but I have every team and individual that has ever finished in the state ranked.

First, let me thank those people who have helped me gather the information. The 2010 Eastside Cross Country team spent hours in our media center typing every name, time, place and school for every state meet into spreadsheets up through the 2010 season as well as all of the team scores from the paper copies that I have collected. That is just under 100 boys meets and just over 70 girls meets. These were all given to MileSplit and their crew have placed all of these into their database. These can now be accessed through the SCRunners Cross Country Calendar. I then went through every meet on SCRunners since 2010 and copied the completed results into spreadsheets. This took a lot of time because the formatting is very difficult to replicate in a spreadsheet from a text file - moving columns, deleting unnecessary information and aligning all of the school and athlete names into appropriate columns. So thanks to John Olson and SCRunners for having the information I need and allowing me to use the data.

I combined every runner that has ever finished the boys state meet course from 1974 into one spreadsheet and the girls from 1978 into another. These sheets currently have 22,192 boys and 18,141 girls. The years prior to the above dates were on courses that I believe are shorter than 5K. Even the 74 boys and 78 girls distance are questionable, but I left them in the data and the times had very little effect on the overall results.

Next, I did the same thing with all of the team places and scores but included all meets in the history of the meet starting with 1970 for the boys (3,086 teams) and 1977 for the girls (2,496 teams).

By using the sort menu in the spreadsheets, I am now able to rank:

1. Every individual by time and/or place

2. Every individual by time and classification

3. Every team by place/ score or team time.

Let me tell you how I decided to do the rankings.

1. Ranking all of the individuals by time - I first had to convert the time with colons (:) into seconds so it would rank correctly. I next ranked each team's top seven times. This may mean that many of the times belong to the same athlete that ran in different years. For example, former Dorman coach and Richland Northeast alumnus Bobby Urban has the best four times ever for that school. After ranking each school's top seven times, I ranked all of these from fastest to slowest time as if they had run in a meet. I then went back and scored each school as a cross country score, lowest wins. This method allows some individuals that made the state meet without a team to put together scores with other teammates of different years to help their overall score.

2. Ranking the best seven individuals per school. Scored the same way as above but using seven different individuals which will increase the score for most schools.

3. Using team scores, determining the number of team scores for each school and ranking.

4. Determining the average team place through the total of years competed.

5. Determining the average team score using all of the years the team competed.

6. Track team scoring. In each state meet, the top eight are scored like track. Points awarded are 10,8,6,5,4,3,2,1.

7. And finally, to determine the best team ever, I added the times of the top five from every team that finished the S.C. state cross country meet to come up with a team time (many of the scoring programs do this now).

These many different methods will show a variety of results. Some schools that have made few state meet appearances may appear very high on some lists and low on others. Same thing with teams that have had some outstanding runners but maybe not a team to back them up. The attempt is to determine the best team and best program over the history of our State Championships.

I have shared the history of the meet through past articles. You can find the updated stats by viewing them below.

Below you will find some new data that I will share before I make my rankings starting next week. I hope that you will study the data below and see if you can come up with the top five in each of the seven categories I have chosen to rank the best ever program/team in South Carolina high school cross country.

To try and compare any two consecutive years is hard to do without some argument about something. A course - even at the same site - will be different from year to year. Last year the two day state meet had great weather on the first day and very cold the next. I remember having many athletes pass out and quite a few taken to hospitals because of the heat in 1986, the year the winners were the "ones that survived." 

Dates in early November and others in late November. Some of the early boys meets were run in December (my only state cross country meet was in December 1973 - cold and raining!). Early in the day or later in the day. All arguments to this comparison. And then we can discuss the way we qualify to get to the South Carolina State Cross Country Meet. 

When cross country started in South Carolina, the meet was an open meet and if you had a team you could come. Class A schools versus all the rest. Then qualifying, which would take a massive research effort to figure out what we did. In the early 1980s the top two teams in every region qualified (16 total). Then we compete Upper/Lower, Upper/Middle/Lower and odd and even ranked races on the same side. Some classes had to qualify and others did not.

The number of teams that qualified have been different. The lowest number of teams during the COVID year of 2020 when the SCHSL limited us to only 12 teams. And then we have the matter of schools possibly changing classifications every two years. Adding a fifth classification with the fifth one splitting into two divisions only adds more championships and teams and individuals to the massive amount of data that I have collected. Finally, we have the multiplier to determine classes that hurt some of the smaller schools' success that they were having in lower classes.

Lastly, everyone needs to know that if a class does not have enough schools to participate in the state championships (which was 16 for a long time, but is now 12) that class would have to move up to run and qualify with the next higher class. For many years the boys and girls ran in one classification meet - Class AAAA. Eventually the AAAs got enough to have their own meet, but the AAs and As did not. 

So throughout the history of the South Carolina State Cross Country Championships there have been lower classification schools competing with the higher classifications. To be consistent, all of my data will have the race classification, not the original class of that school during that year.

Whether fair or unfair, the results of our meets have been determined. Fast courses, fast days, wet, warm or cold, windy or calm, sand or no sand - we all competed. Some schools have recently opened or started having teams, and even though many have been very successful, is there enough data to support a historic program? 

I know I have made mistakes. Every time I go back through the data to determine something, I would find an error so then I would have to go back through it all and rerank the individuals or teams. Schools with periods in their name (or not), like TL Hanna and JL Mann as well as two different Wade Hamptons (one in Hampton and one in Greenville) made things even more difficult. 

During your study of my outcomes, please let me know if you question anything and I will be glad to check things out.

Number of South Carolina State Cross Country Championships team appearances

Current Consecutive State Meets

Number of Top 8 Teams (used for Track Scoring)