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Saturday, March 1, 2008
How To Score a Track Meet
Greater Louisville, KY
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It takes more than a few star runners for a team to win the meet
It is a beautiful day for a track meet. It is about 65 degrees with a slight breeze and the sun is shining, but there are just enough clouds to send a shadow over the athletes as they warm up. Like most track meets, the energy is contagious. Runners, jumpers, pole vaulters, competitors of all field events are stretching and practicing, patiently waiting for those few short seconds when they will get to prove their speed or strength. After all, for a track and field athlete, practice lasts for months and the meet for hours, but their event only seconds.
The seasoned track meet fan knows to bring a blanket, chair, umbrella and plenty to drink. Some parents even have the turkey sandwich with grapes and pretzels for their young athlete to snack on in between the races, sometimes hours apart. There are not many “good” seats unless you happen to be somewhere like Male High School on Preston Highway, where you can sit at almost any point of the track. Paul Dunbar Stadium in Lexington is a little more difficult, so you should have binoculars or a zoom on your camera.
Have you ever wondered how a track meet is scored? Or why some of the teams whose runners place in almost every race don’t even place in the final tally of the meet? For instance, last year on May 26th in a regional meet held at U of L, Jeffersontown High School’s Anthony Kimbrough placed second in the boys’ 100 meter dash. Later, J-town’s Dexter Collier was sixth in the same race but a different heat. During the meet, Jeffersontown placed in several more races, but in the final tally, the J-town team placed tenth.
How do you score a track meet?
To begin with, a team that has multiple participants in multiple events has a much better chance of winning a meet. The team with the most points wins the meet, and points are awarded for the first several places of each event. Keep in mind that one event, let’s say the 100 yard dash in Anthony’s case, may have more than one heat. Heats are a breakdown of one race. The track only has so many lanes, and if there are more participants than lanes, runners race in groups until all the qualifying participants have run. So, even if a runner comes in second in one heat, as Anthony did, he may not place second in the entire race, as was the case.
Still, J-town scored some points for the races in which they did place. The only problem was that they did not have entrants in enough events. The schools that won that meet had 81 more points in the boys’ final scores because they had participants in more events.
This is a great example of how simply having more runners participate can benefit the entire team.
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