DyeStat cross country rankings include all 1997 high school results available to us involving Maryland teams. I attend all Middletown High School meets and as many others as possible. I also check the newspapers, and coaches send me results. As time permits, I will include any results provided to me. If the results are in electronic form (email or disk), they have a much better chance of making it.

Cross country performances are inherently non-comparable. Courses vary infinitely in difficulty, based on terrain and other factors. Anyone who has run the hills of Hereford High School will agree to that. Even the distance may be different, with some high school races in Maryland run at 3 miles and some at 5,000 meters (about 3.1 miles) and some at other odd distances. Add in variables like weather and you have a precarious situation if you want to know how a 19 minutes at Clear Spring compares to 19:30 at Hereford.

Despite the difficulties, everyone compares. How else can you plan for conference, county, regional, or state meets? Coaches use subjective adjustments. They know that some courses are harder than others, and they will tell you that Course X is 20 seconds slower or faster than Course Y.

DyeStat rankings are based on the following arbitrary decisions:

Subjective adjustments are too . . . , well, . . . subjective, and not available for all courses, so they will not be used.

Times will be adjusted to 3 miles, the official distance for the state meet. This will be done by multiplying any actual time in seconds times a multiplier that has 3.0 as the numerator and the distance in miles as the denominator. Thus, if it is a 3 mile course, the multiplier is 1 (3.0 divided by 3.0) and the actual time is used. If the course is longer than 3 miles, the multiplier is less than 1 and the time is reduced to be equivalent to 3 miles. Results are rounded down to whole seconds to avoid a false sense of precision, and the answer is converted back to minutes and seconds for display (in case you don't divide by 60 in your head).

The course distance used in the calculation will be displayed on the DyeStat Schedule. Courses reported as 5,000 meters will be shown as 3.1 miles, based on the table below. If I have no knowledge at all and the times don't appear too slow, I call it 3.0 miles to avoid making someone look better than they are. If anyone has OBJECTIVE, RELIABLE information on any course distance, please contact DyeStat.