Two years ago we saw that the schools that managed to get the largest portion of their freshman classes out for cross country had the best chance of winning state in their respective classification. That has not changed. What has changed is that the bar is being raised. Freshman participation in cross country has increased an astounding 25% in the past two years. Clearly our overall population is not increasing anywhere close to that rate, suggesting that the coaches are being more successful at freshman recruiting. This increase has several implications:
- We will need to either have more meets, more races in existing meets or more runners per race.
- We can expect winning times to continue to improve.
- The coaches’ jobs have become more difficult.
If you are thinking about starting a new meet or expanding an existing meet, now would be a great time. Someone will take advantage of this growth in participation. It might as well be you.
People on this board have remarked about the success of the class of 2014 for the past two years. I submit that much of that success is because the class of 2014 has had more of its members running cross country than have the preceding classes. If that is the case, we can expect the classes of 2015 and 2016 to exceed the accomplishments of the class of 2014.
It will be interesting to see how coaches adapt to the projected increase in competition. What has worked in the past will not work quite so well in the future. Mill Creek had 7 freshman in 2009, 12 freshmen in 2010, 14 freshmen in 2011, and 19 freshmen in 2012. We have seen that growth correlate with the program’s progression from also-ran to contender to possibly the verge of a dynasty. The strategy that allowed some teams to beat Mill Creek four years ago will probably not work any longer. Mill Creek’s competitors will need to either improve what they have done in the past or lose to Mill Creek more frequently in the future.
If you are thinking that this is not your problem because Mill Creek is not in your classification, think again. We had almost 500 more freshmen participants in 2012 than we had just three years earlier. All of those 500 were not on Mill Creek’s squad. Some of your competitors are getting stronger as well!
In terms of benchmarking, we can divide the number of freshman recruits by the school size to compute a freshman recruitment rate. This normalizes the data across a wide range of school sizes. If a school recruits 25 freshman boys each year and the school population is 2000 (250 boys per class), they have a 10% freshman recruitment rate. The threshold for success appears to be 5% for classes AA through AAAAAA and 10% for class A. Schools that exceed that threshold have a 15% chance of winning a state championship in a given year. Schools that fail to meet that threshold have less than a 0.5% chance of winning a state championship each year.
Note the drastic difference in freshman recruiting rates between dynasty, competitor and also ran programs.
Dynasty: 10.6%
Contender: 4.1%
Also Ran: 1.5%
Private Benchmark: Athens Academy: 20.9%
Public Benchmark: Brookwood: 8.8%
(This study included all runners in all classifications except 1A public from the classes of 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013.)
Just as we saw two years ago, the freshman recruitment rate is the best indicator of a successful program. The difference now is that with many teams recruiting more and more freshmen, the bar has been raised. I suspect that the 3-5% recruitment rate that has allowed some schools to be contenders in the past will no longer be sufficient for them to remain as contenders in the future.