For starters, I found Holmdel Park to be
somewhat faster in 2003 (compared to other years) ... As a side-topic to
my findings, the course records
for Holmdel Park are available from the Scullion web-site as follows:
http://www.monmouth.com/~scullion/records/hpbtimes.htm
Nine of the top 32 boy's times ever run at Holmdel
Park were recorded in 2003 ... since the records go back to the late
1970s, that's a fairly healthy percentage of best times occurring in one
single season ... Viewed from the outside, two explanations seem
possible, (1) the group of runners competing in 2003 was exceptionally
good compared to other years, and (2) the course itself was faster for
some reason (length change, re-surfacing, perfect conditions, whatever)
... Note: I do not follow New Jersey racing that closely
... but it would be unusual if explanation (1) above was the only reason
... I defer to NJ experts as to the viability of explanation (1).
Comparison (Using Three Races)
One primary method of determining comparative speed is using individual runners as references ... But to have statistical significance, you need a sufficient number of individuals ... Thankfully, the New Jersey Meet of Champions (MOC at Holmdel), the New York Federation Championship (at Bowdoin), and the Footlocker NE Qualifier (at Van Cortlandt Park) have a sufficient number of individuals that ran in two of the three races ... so a comparison is possible.
Bottom-Line - Here are the Results (for those who don't want to examine the whole article):
Boys NJ-MOC = 10 - 15 seconds faster than Footlocker NE
Girls NJ-MOC = 10 - 15 seconds faster than Footlocker NE
Boys NY-Federation = 5 - 10 seconds slower than Footlocker NE
Girls NY-Federation = 1 - 4 seconds slower than Footlocker NE
Comparing Holmdel Park and Van Cortlandt Park (5K) ... Table 1 below lists runners who competed in both the NJ-MOC and the Footlocker NE race, with the time difference (in seconds) between each individual's final times at both courses ... If you looked at just the runners who qualified for Footlocker Finals (Jonathan Anderson, Brittany Sedberry, Jennifer Clausen), you might think Holmdel is a lot slower than VCP, but you must consider all runners ... Remember - in general, runners qualifying for Footlocker Finals run exceptionally fast races in comparison to other runners.
Outlier Data ... generating statistical results (with better accuracy) from the time differences in Table 1 requires removal of "outlier data points" ... here, "outlier data" are simply time differences that are inconsistent with the majority of time differences (in general, too high or too low) ... A good example of an outlier data point is the time difference for Justin Scheid who ran 71.7 seconds slower at VCP than at Holmdel - basically, he had a bad race at Footlockers which is inconsistent with his typical race, so his data point is thrown out.
Even with the outlier data included, we are still looking for the range where most data points fall ... statistically, this is nearer the "median" of the time differences which is not the same as the average. An easy way of viewing the data is to graph the times differences in a histogram chart (a vertical bar chart of ranges) ... Here is a histogram chart for the MOC-FLNE time differences (combined boys and girls, selected outliers removed):
As seen from the chart, most data points fall between 0 and -30 ... the statistical median is about -13 ... so using runners as references, that's the difference between Holmdel and VCP (for those two races).
Comparing Bowdoin Park and Van Cortlandt Park (5K) ... Table 2 below lists runners who competed in both the NY-Federation and the Footlocker NE race, with the time difference (in seconds) between each individual's final times at both courses ... Here is a histogram chart for the Fed-FLNE time differences (combined boys and girls, selected outliers removed):
The median of the data falls between 0 and +10 seconds ... So, Bowdoin Park (at Feds) was a little slower than VCP (at FLNE) ... by comparison, Holmdel was faster than VCP ... Therefore, Holmdel was also faster than Bowdoin.
Other Considerations ... experience has shown that runners are more consistent in performance when racing for their teams during the high school season as compared to an individual race like Footlocker ... The time differences in Tables 1 and 2 have a very large range in comparison to regular season races ... The NY runners had a two week break after Federations, and many runners may not have had serious organized XC practices during the break ... The NJ MOC was the week before Footlockers, and some runners may have been "tired" at Footlockers ... who knows? - maybe the pressure of team racing helps the majority of runners ... But clearly the number of "outliers" rise sharply at Footlockers, so that "noise" must be eliminated where possible to achieve accuracy in comparing races.