This is a pretty arbitrary metric... it's not like Sarah Thompson and her coach sat down at the beginning of the season and said "hey, let's see if we can get a best-average mile time under 16:30 with 3 swims this season!" In fact, NESCAC teams dont even have a midseason invite, and Thompson was so fast that with an NCAA invite assured, would have had no reason to do a full taper for conference.
There are of course schools of thought that this all should change, and metrics like the one you have chosen here should be more of a focus. Radical ideas like individual event conference titles being awarded on the basis of a best average of swims across a season rather than a single performance... Team titles by dual meet records rather than a single champ meet... National invites by best average times. I personally love these ideas - I think the whole thing about the sport of swimming where you slog it out for 6 months and put all your eggs in one basket at the end of the road is simply no fun at all, and the sport could be way better off and more exciting if you had more competitions that actually meant something. (ISL is a good example of something more like this). That said, that isn't happening any time soon, sadly. And until it does I don't really think its fair to say that one athlete was a better swimmer than another for being more consistent within a season. That's just not what any of them are even trying to do.
Hey Tim, as usual, your post contain much with which I agree.
I like the ideas you mention about assessing athletic performances. But I am not calling for a revision of how we grant championships in a given season. I think it is in the 'look back' - the historical perspective - where the full scope of an athlete's swims - highs/lows, averages/medians/standards - becomes more relevant.
As for the arbitrariness of 16:30, yeh. I choose '16:30' because it seemed like a simple standard. It is the dumbed-down version of what we got from taking the average of the 1000 fastest women's mile swims in Division III, dating back to 2009, and then looking at the standard deviations.
Three full standard deviations above the average is...16:33.29. (so, '3+ SD' = more than three standard deviations above average, or faster than 16:33.29).
Mostly I thought it just easier to say 16:30., because:
1. talking about standard deviations is confusing,
2. using a standard like 16:33.29 - without explaining why - is even more confusing, and
3. using 16:33.29 makes it look like we gamed it for Ms. Cornish.*
* Ms. Cornish has four 3+ SD swims (in 365 days). Ms. Thompson took twice as long (729 days) to log just three 3+ SD swims. No one else has more than two in their entire career. And Ms. Cornish is just now half-way through her career, etc.
Ultimately, that 3+ SD standard is much less arbitrary, yet the results suggest about the same thing.
There are a few things in the second to last sentence of your comment that mischaracterize what is written in the post. And that's fine, it is the nature of argumentation. And this strikes me as a good faith argument on both sides.
This is a pretty arbitrary metric... it's not like Sarah Thompson and her coach sat down at the beginning of the season and said "hey, let's see if we can get a best-average mile time under 16:30 with 3 swims this season!" In fact, NESCAC teams dont even have a midseason invite, and Thompson was so fast that with an NCAA invite assured, would have had no reason to do a full taper for conference.
There are of course schools of thought that this all should change, and metrics like the one you have chosen here should be more of a focus. Radical ideas like individual event conference titles being awarded on the basis of a best average of swims across a season rather than a single performance... Team titles by dual meet records rather than a single champ meet... National invites by best average times. I personally love these ideas - I think the whole thing about the sport of swimming where you slog it out for 6 months and put all your eggs in one basket at the end of the road is simply no fun at all, and the sport could be way better off and more exciting if you had more competitions that actually meant something. (ISL is a good example of something more like this). That said, that isn't happening any time soon, sadly. And until it does I don't really think its fair to say that one athlete was a better swimmer than another for being more consistent within a season. That's just not what any of them are even trying to do.
Hey Tim, as usual, your post contain much with which I agree.
I like the ideas you mention about assessing athletic performances. But I am not calling for a revision of how we grant championships in a given season. I think it is in the 'look back' - the historical perspective - where the full scope of an athlete's swims - highs/lows, averages/medians/standards - becomes more relevant.
As for the arbitrariness of 16:30, yeh. I choose '16:30' because it seemed like a simple standard. It is the dumbed-down version of what we got from taking the average of the 1000 fastest women's mile swims in Division III, dating back to 2009, and then looking at the standard deviations.
Three full standard deviations above the average is...16:33.29. (so, '3+ SD' = more than three standard deviations above average, or faster than 16:33.29).
Mostly I thought it just easier to say 16:30., because:
1. talking about standard deviations is confusing,
2. using a standard like 16:33.29 - without explaining why - is even more confusing, and
3. using 16:33.29 makes it look like we gamed it for Ms. Cornish.*
* Ms. Cornish has four 3+ SD swims (in 365 days). Ms. Thompson took twice as long (729 days) to log just three 3+ SD swims. No one else has more than two in their entire career. And Ms. Cornish is just now half-way through her career, etc.
Ultimately, that 3+ SD standard is much less arbitrary, yet the results suggest about the same thing.
There are a few things in the second to last sentence of your comment that mischaracterize what is written in the post. And that's fine, it is the nature of argumentation. And this strikes me as a good faith argument on both sides.
No argument here. She’s amazing!