About

About CCRS - CCRS stand for Cross Country Rating System. It is a statistical method I created in 2015 to better assess and compare cross country results.

How it works:

1. The system is based on average time for a team's scoring runners. This is obviously the best single predictor of a team's success or ability, as well as the easiest metric to accumulate in a large data set.

2. The average team has a rating score of 100. A team with a score of 101 is 1% faster than an average team, etc.

3. Every team in a given meet can be used to create a "par time" for the course, based on their rating, that a team with a score of 100 would be expected to average. The average par time from these calculations is the official par time for the course. Teams are then scored based on their performance relative to the par time.

       Example: If, in a two team meet, a team with a CCRS of 100 averages 18:00 on a 5k course, it would suggest that the par time for that course is 18:00. If the other team with a CCRS of 102 averages 17:47 on the same course, it would suggest a par time of 18:08. The official par time for the course would be set to 18:04. The first team would receive a score of 100.4 and the second team a score of 101.6.

Effectively, each meet acts as a redistribution of points, with the new scores recalibrating the relative differences between each team. In a two team example, this appears fairly crude, but a typical meet of 8-10 or more teams allows for a high level of precision.

4. Pre-season estimates were given by re-scoring each team's underclassman at the end of last season. At whichever meet a team last had five underclassmen run (sections or conferences, basically), a score for those top 5 was calculated and scared to create a preseason score for this season


Notes:

1. The system generally cannot account for injuries, illness, etc. so obviously some data will be a little faulty. This mostly smooths out with a lot of data (and larger meets, which temper the effects of a team performing significantly against expectation).
2. Efforts will be made to ensure that JV squads that occasionally run in varsity meets will not be used in the ratings.
3. AA competition only counts towards ratings.