PSAL Championship Follow-up

We said that we’d be back later in the week to discuss some comments overheard at the awards/finish line area.

But first, our readers were nice enough to point out that Ben Berman of Bronx Science likely did not race because of a PSAL rule requiring athletes to have run at least one PSAL meet during the regular season in order to be eligible to race at the City Championship. This seems like a pretty reasonable rule as long as they aren’t forcing athletes to race through injury in order to make themselves eligible.

We welcome all comments/feedback, so thank you to those readers who helped to shed some light on the absence of arguably the fastest runner in PSAL history.

Now to the Girls’ award ceremony. Let us start by saying that we do not remember the exact quote, so in order to avoid attributing a false quote to a PSAL coach we won’t try to recreate it. One of the coaches in the area of the ceremony made a comment that the LaGuardia girls team didn’t look like the typical PSAL girls team and that they looked more like a suburban team. Now, the coach that made the comment was himself white and it seemed to us like he was making a joke. And while it drew some odd looks, most people who heard it also seemed to believe that he was making a joke.

But we thought we’d explore this comment a little more. For one, if you’ve ever been to the NYS Federation meet, you have seen that most of the top teams do usually look like LaGuardia. In fact, if you follow social media you’ll see that in New York state and beyond, girls cross country is an overwhelmingly white sport. While they may look different in New York City, they would blend right in almost anywhere outside the city. So, this coach wasn’t necessarily wrong.

We don’t think this coach was implying that this somehow gave LaGuardia an advantage, so we won’t even address that as an argument. But what we can do is compare the demographics of some of the top programs in New York state to the top programs in the PSAL.

Here are the 15 teams that finished ahead of LaGuardia at the Federation meet last season and the percentage of their population that identifies as white.

Bethlehem                  84%

Shenendehowa           73%

Saratoga Springs         86%

Liverpool                     68%

Irondequoit                 66%

Auburn                        77%

Guilderland                 71%

Sayville                        86%

Northport                    79%

Tappan Zee                  62%

East Aurora                 94%

Somers                        81%

Scarsdale                     61%

Cornwall                      61%

It’s important to note that there are probably hundreds of other programs in the state that have similar demographics to the schools listed above, and yet they aren’t enjoying the same success.

And here are the top PSAL teams from this season.

LaGuardia                    43%

Susan Wagner             36%

Stuyvesant                  18%

Brooklyn Tech             24%

Bronx Science             21%

Hunter                         No Data Available

RKA                             22%

Townsend Harris         16%

Tottenville                   67%

Beacon                        37%

Francis Lewis               13%

HSMSE                        35%

Columbia Secondary   27%

The Clinton School      55%

Midwood                    20%

Bard                            36%

James Madison           49%

WESS                           52%

Bayside                        13%

These numbers are all over the map, so we looked into whether a better indicator of success is total girls enrolled.

LaGuardia                    1,726

Susan Wagner             1,474

Stuyvesant                  1,503

Brooklyn Tech             2,562

Bronx Science             1,363

Hunter                         No Data Available

RKA                             316

Townsend Harris         772

Tottenville                   1,921

Beacon                        928

Francis Lewis               2,035

HSMSE                        195

Columbia Secondary   333

The Clinton School      521

Midwood                    2,133

Bard                            342

James Madison           1,632

WESS                           370

Bayside                        1,455

The main thing that these numbers tell us is that overall numbers seem to have a larger impact than racial demographics. The top 5 teams in the league this season got to choose from at least 1,300 girls in their school. This is not a surprising finding.

But the number one factor in success isn’t even listed above and it’s not a demographic at all. It is hard work. Congratulations again to the LaGuardia girls for all of the hard work they put in to run as fast as they did.

Finally, we used https://data.nysed.gov/ for our data, and we couldn’t figure out why Hunter’s demographics aren’t available there. Perhaps one of our readers could let us know why.