It should be noted, in comparing results from one year to the next, that the rules have changed almost every year. I give a brief synopsis of the special rules, if any, which applied each year.
Rule changes this year: the Mountain Goat 3k counts as if run on a track; you can't submit times from longer races in order to earn a participation point in a shorter event except for the "official" exceptions - Marathon for 15k, e.g.
In the end it was Ruthless Carnage, captained by Jeff Carnes and Ruth Yanai, that emerged victorious.
Rule Changes this year: Anyone 85 years old or older earns 2 participation points in individual events rather than only one.
But no! Captains Phil Driscoll and Pete McClure, perhaps calling upon the talents of he-who-must-not-be-named, rallied their Old and Slow teammates to build an insurmountable lead by early April.
Rule changes this year: Can't remember any.
In the end, though, this year will be remembered (and mourned) as Nick Wetter's last as commish. Nick, you made more of a difference in our lives than you could possibly know. What a man!
Rule Changes this year: None that I can recall.
Rule Changes this year: ESF students and faculty are now considered the same as SU students and faculty for the purposes of the competition. Up to 4 students (graduate and undergraduate) may be picked for each team.
The rest, as they say, is history.
No rules changes this year. Could it be that we've finally gotten things right?
Rules changes this year: Now you can submit outside marks any time you want. Road times will be rounded up to the nearest second.
Rules changes this year: You can submit 10 mile runs instead of 15K's and they will be scored by actual 10 mile standards. All outside marks recorded before the draft dinner (November 11) must be turned in to the commish before January 1.
After an early lead by the ultimately victorious Team Terryfic, the winter season was dominated by Snow Squalls, captained by Stan More. Alas, with April's warm winds, the accumlated lead of the squalls began to melt under the relentless attack of Captain McConnell and stealth Co-captain Roger Hahn.
Dick Coleman was designated a honorary "exempt" runner for life. (Dick, the former head track and field coach at SU has accepted a new job as athletic director at SUNY Delhi. Their gain, our loss.)
The "getting to know you" cross country run was dropped this year.
This year began with a new event: a non-competitive XC fun run whose purpose was to allow the captains to meet their teams. Everybody started from the outdoor track and ran up to skytop and around on the golf course until satisfied. Of course, the usual running groups quickly formed up and went their own ways, so it is questionable whether this accomplished the desired goal. Everybody got one point for showing up.
For the first time, runner's points were computed according to their age on the day of the race, rather than on May 15. Sadly, this ended a long- standing windfall for yours-truly, whose birthday falls on April 30th, thus allowing him to spend almost an entire season impersonating an older runner.
The 1500M was replaced by the mile. Too bad. In my opinion the mile is half a lap too long. The DMR was dropped and mourned by none.
Sadly, this was to be Bill O'Brien's last season. Bill passed away on June 28th. We will miss him.
This year saw the introduction of the infamous DMR relay. Since different legs of this relay run different distances (normally 800-400-1200-1600,) and since the runners of these legs may well belong to different age/sex groups, it would be necessary to record which runner ran which leg in order to apply the usual scoring algorithm. This was deemed to be too much of an imposition on the Commish, and so a very complicated scoring system was devised: briefly, the scoring program considered all possible permutations of runners among the legs and assigned the lowest score that resulted. Unfortunately many captains failed to grasp the implications of this (hmmm, ..., this is supposed to be an Academic community ???)
This year also saw the ascendency of the Sprinter Cabal. During the drunken wee hours of the annual draft banquet this group managed to foist upon the rest of us the 4x200m relay and the either-100m-or-15k rule. ( One receives the higher score from the 100m and the 15k, but credit for only one of them.)
Indeed, a very strange season.
The 8k was dropped this year, and Steve Nix was made an honorary "exempt" runner for life.
John "Honest John" Condon's Slow Twitch team narrowly lost to the Terryers when Condon called himself on a technicality the last day of competition. At that point, Slow Twitch led by one.
This year could properly be considered the beginning of the "modern era" of the competition. The old 6-point scoring scale was replaced by the current 10 point scale, and we agreed upon a method for recording and summarizing results that is still used today: Patti Ford laboriously typed all the results from each day's competition and sent them by email to Ed Stabler and the Commish. Ed had written a program which could process these raw results into the form given here and above as "Results (processed.)" All of Patti's emails adhere to a strict grammer expected by Ed's program. Her messages have been assembled for each year beginning with this one and are listed as "Results (unprocessed.)" In addition, Patti created and maintained a roster of players giving DOB and other information needed by Ed's program. The entire group owes Patti a deep debt of gratitude for all of this work over the years.
The 8k was added this year.
Tom Fondy wins "most improved", and Fred Greenaway is rookie of the year. Ascii text Results This may have been the last year of the "Faculty Clearinghouse", a kind of virtual track competition in which participating colleges sent in their results by post. It was each college faculty/staff against all of the others. Records of the best performances in each event were kept. The idea never really caught on, but Nebraska, Kansas, Stanford, Duke, Glassboro, N.C. State, and the University of Colorado Denver, in addition to Syracuse, all participated at one time or another.
Steve Murphy and Tom Fondy's first season. At this point the league is still called the Faculty/Staff jogging program. If this is jogging, I'd hate to see running! Ascii text Results
Ascii text Results
This is the first year for which we have recorded results, and maybe the first year of the program (anybody know for sure?) Wow, some of these guys were pretty good runners in their youth! (Thanks to Patti for laboriously typing these in by hand.) Ascii text Results
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