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The Final Championship

      The boys and girls of the Marmonte League did not disappoint!  Sarah Baxter lowered her course record to 16:22 and the Simi girls lowered the team time record by 29 seconds as well. On the boys side, Westlake and Simi gave us a show, with Westlake coming out on top 40 to 47, with two of the top 5 team times ever run.  It also should be noted that Mikey Giguere and Juan Jimenez ran the #3 and 4 times ever on the course, with Jimenez being the fastest Junior ever.  Here are the Full Results of yesterday's final Marmonte League Final.  

Top Lists

      As promised, here is a closer look at the actual performances on the Marmonte League Championship Course at Agoura High School, plus a little more historical analysis to follow. Yesterday was the final Marmonte league Championship and it did not disappoint!  We saw 4 boys and 3 girls jump onto (or move up) the individula Top 10 All-Time lists, and 2 boys and 2 girls teams do the same.  

      Thanks to coach Joe Snyder of Westlake High, I was able to get the missing course history which actually started in 1998, not 1992 as I previously heard.  Here are the long awaited lists.

Boys Top 10 Individuals

Boys Top 10 Teams

Girls Top 10 Individuals

Girls Top 10 Teams

      So was 2013 the best year ever?  I guess it all depends how you measure it.  We certainly had the fastest girls team ever and what appears to be the deepest boys field ever. But with all this data already loaded into Excel, we have to do a couple more calcuations don't we?

      I scored all 16 years data looking at the top 7 runners of each year rather than team. Here's where they ended up:

Girls Scoring by Year

Top 3 "Year Teams":

Boys Scoring by Year

Top 3 "Year Teams":

      Using this measure, 2013 was second for girls and first for boys - and certainly the best year on a combined basis. Note that the top 7 boys come from 5 different schools this year - a testament to the depth on the boys side.

      For our last look, I took a sampling of performances for each year to build a some trend lines for both the boys and girls. I graphed #1,5,10,20,30,and 40 performance for each year. Keep in mind that with an 8 team league, a full field contains 56 runners. Here are the trend charts for both boys and girls:

Girls 1998 to 2013

      The the times of the Marmonte girls have continued to trend down, with 2013 coming nearly even with 2011.

Boys 1998 to 2013 

      As you can see from the boys trend, well, the Marmonte boys are ridiculous!  A 16:45 will only get you 40th place in 2013, while it would have put you just outside the top 10 in 2000.  The consistency of the marks at the front is astounding.

Conclusion

     In 2012 I looked at this data and saw that the Thousand Oaks team was the fastest ever to stay home from CIF Prelims with an 81:46 team time (16:21 average). That pales in comparison to 2013, with Newbury Park staying home with a scorching 80:23 (16:05 average). Perhaps this is just more of a indicator that a split is best to level the playing field a bit.

      So that's a wrap for the Super Marmonte League Cross Country League Finals. We still have 3 girls teams and 4 boys teams going to post season, plus several outstanding individuals. Best of luck to everyone with their post season and with your new league affilliation for 2014!

- Scott

Credits: I must give credit to those who supplied much of this data, including Ken Reeves, Chad Scott, Joe Snyder, Bill Duley, and Jack Farrell. Thanks for sharing this history with us!