After Tuesday’s girl’s track sectional at Franklin County High School, coaches and media met in the press box to pick up the computerized listing of the results.

While we were waiting, the results of the final events came in and were announced over the public address system. After the last event’s winners were announced, the team results for all 16 events were given.

During the announcement that East Central had claimed the title Coach Merle Hines of Oldenburg Academy said “Of course East Central won. They have the biggest enrollment.”

Indeed they do. They are 43 percent larger than the next largest school, South Dearborn. Franklin County is 47 percent smaller and the next two largest schools, Batesville and Greensburg, combined have 88 fewer students than East Central has alone.

Looking at it from the other end, the five smallest schools, Oldenburg, Jac-Cen-Del, South Decatur, Rising Sun and North Decatur, combined have a slightly larger number of students 1521 to 1404..

Now, how would the sectional have looked if it were competed by six schools with similar enrollments.

To do this, I’m going to “consolidate” six schools into three - South Dearborn and Milan, Franklin County and South Ripley and Switzerland County and Lawrenceburg. The latter consolidation is the smallest group of all with 1044 students. The five smallest make up the largest group, 1521. East Central has 1404, South Dearborn and Milan has 1376, Franklin County- South Ripley has 1355 and Batesville and Greensburg have 1316 combined.

If my logic is correct and athletic ability is evenly distributed across a population, then the scores should be tightly grouped (with the exception of the Lawrenceburg and Switzerland County combination).

When that arithmetic was done, the small school group had

154 points, East Central 149.5 and Batesville and Greensburg 149. South Dearborn and Milan combined for 77 points and Franklin County and South Ripley scored 73.5 points. The smallest school group however did finish with the lowest score, 32 points.

When you look at the standings versus placement, you find that the five largest schools all placed in the top five. The only differences were that the Pirates and Batesville are fifth and fourth in size but finished second and third. South Dearborn and Franklin County both finished two places lower in rank than their size.

There was a drop off of more than 100 students between the fifth largest school, Greensburg, and the sixth largest, Switzerland County.

From that point down, the rankings don’t come close to correlating with size with four schools scoring significantly higher than their size led by Jac-Cen-Del, North Decatur, the Academy and South Decatur.

In the case of the county teams and Jac-Cen-Del, the reason runs counter to my argument.

In Jac-Cen-Del’s case, Val Wagner qualified in four individual events with firsts in the 100- and the 200-meter dashes and the long jump. She finished second in the 400-meter dash giving her school 38 of the 40.5 points it scored..