Gary Dudgeon
Greensburg Daily News
May 15, 2008 10:57 pm
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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..
In North Decatur’s case it wasn’t one athlete but four as April Fruchtnicht qualified second in the long jump, Hayley Hayden finished fourth in the 100- and 200- meters, Victoria Leffel took third in the 1600 and Kendra Fasbinder finished second in both the 100- and 300-meter hurdles.
The Cougars didn’t qualify anyone but they had five competitors score in the second tier scoring, four of whom ran on the relays that included a fifth place finish in the 4x100 relay and Oldenburg, like their coach, likes the longer distances as placing eighth in the 4x400 relay, sixth in the 3200, a qualifying fourth in the metric mile. Their 3200-meter relay team took second.
This data doesn’t disprove my premise. At smaller schools, you don’t have the numbers to make up the difference if you have fewer athletes in any class than what you would normally expect.
If you need 25 athletes for a quality athletic program and you have one athlete for every 50 students, you need 1,250 students to have a quality program. If it slips to 60-1, then you need 1,500 students.
East Central can survive a down year. They have numbers. But the Pirates will need to improve to about 25-1 to match the Trojans.
That probably won’t happen unless you get a Val Wagner who happens to be a twin.
But then, Greensburg and Batesville did finish higher than did Franklin County and South Dearborn, both larger schools.
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