ANALYSIS OF IMPACT OF COVID-19 TO ‘21 CITY XC SEASON

 Our Approach . . .

In order to understand the ‘In-Season’ improvements over the course of the 2021 City season we rated ‘Beginning-of-Season’ City performances by looking at ‘21 and ‘19 Woodbridge results and ‘End-of-Season’ City performances by looking at ‘21 and ‘19 City Finals results. 2021 ‘Beginning-of-Season’ ratings are based on comparing ‘21 Woodbridge City results to ‘19 Woodbridge City results (down 8.7% in ‘21 versus ‘19 for boys and down 13.9% for girls). 2021 ‘End-of-Season’ ratings are based on comparing ‘21 City Finals results to ‘19 City Final results (down 5.4% in ‘21 versus ‘19 for boy, and down 5.7% for girls). The 2021 ‘In-Season' change is the difference between the ‘Beginning-of-Season’ rating and the ‘End-of-Season’ rating (improvement of 5.4% for boys and 11.4% for girls).

We compared 2021 results to 2019 because ‘19 is the nearest full-season dataset and therefore should have fewer extraneous variables such as division re-allocations or shifts in participation that might obscure the COVID-19 impact. But keep in mind that 2019 was by no means an average year. In fact 2019 was below average on many metrics compared to average City performances over the last 10 years (see the next section for a year-to-year comparison of City Championship results).

Comparisons in the tables above that involve City performances from Woodbridge ‘21 do NOT include divisions 3 and 4 since these divisions did not participate in the ‘21 Woodbridge Invitational. In order to keep the analysis comparative when evaluating Woodbridge ‘21 City results to either ‘2019 Woodbridge results or ‘21 or ‘19 City Final results we chose to exclude divisions 3 and 4 from all Woodbridge AND City Final races, for 2021 AND 2019.

We focused on the ‘Scoring Runners’ (top 5 runners for each team) vs ‘All Runners’ in our analysis to eliminate some of the exaggerated outlier variability inherent in the 6th and 7th place runners, particularly in City results, and to keep comparisons consistent since some teams don’t have a 6th or 7th runner.