Occassional thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
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Saturday, July 31, 2004 Picking a teamThe U.S. WOC team will be selected this week. The process in the U.S. is pretty simple (poke around the U.S. O' Federation web page if you're really interested in the details). We've got two races and the top 3 finishers are put on the team. The last place is a discretionary selection, but there are some defined limits on who can qualify for the discretionary spot. More likely than not, I expect the fourth person to be the person who finishes fourth at the team trails.Essentially the selection process has been to have a race and put the top finishers at the race on the team. Over the years the team trials has changed a bit, but the basic approach hasn't really changed. I'd say there have been two main changes. First, the races have become less tough. In the 1980s, the U.S. had three races with each race being a bit longer than a normal race. Second, the national team has limited the discretion in picking the discretionary spots. Typically, there is a lot of discussion about the process either in the months leading up to the selections or in the months after the selections. Everyone has an opinion about how, when and where the selections should take place. I'm not sure we've ever looked back and tried to figure out if the selection process worked. Did the best runners get picked? Did the runners perform at the WOC consistently with their team trials performance? It seems like a good process would usually result in getting the best runners to the WOC and that the top finishers in the team trials would also be the top performers at the WOC. I looked at the 2001 team trials and WOC results to answer those questions. Did the best runners get picked? Not in 2001. In 2001, Mikell Platt was the top U.S. runners and declined a spot on the WOC team. Kristin Hall was probably the top U.S. woman and she did get selected to a discretionary spot. If I remember right, Kristin didn't run the trials. Did the runners perform at the WOC consistently with their team trials performances? Sort of. I ranked the U.S. runners 1-5 based on their team trials results. For the men it was: Eric Bone, Kenny Walker, me, James Scarborough and Eddie Bergeron. For the women it was: Kristin Hall (I put her in the number 1 spot even though she was the last selected), Pavlina Brautigam, Peggy Dickison, Karen Williams and Eilen Breseman. Next I looked at the race results from Finland and ordered the runners according to their WOC results. For example, for the men in the middle qualifying races, James finished 18th in his heat and was the best U.S. result; Eric was 28th in his heat which was the 2nd best U.S. result; I was 29th in my heat, the 3rd best U.S. result; and Kenny was 34th, the 4th best U.S. result. If we'd run consistently with our performance at the team trials, Eric would have been the best U.S. runner, followed by Kenny, me and then James. Our actual performances were a good bit different than our team trails performances. While we finished 1, 2, 3 and 4 in the team trails, we finished 2, 4, 3 and 1 in the WOC. Maybe that is ok. But it makes me wonder if someone who finished behind me in the team trials would have done better than me in the WOC. Add to my list of projects: look at team trials and WOC results for some other years and some other nations and ask "do selection race performances predict WOC performances?" posted by Michael | 9:03 PM 
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