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.
Very sadly, we said goodbye to charter member Roger Hahn, a great runner, captain, and friend to all of us. As would be expected, Roger's last event was a relay.
But I digress. The "Rapids" led the "Bunch" pretty much all season, and the real drama was the race for third. Heather caught 'em, and just in the nick of time.
Rule changes: Patti Ford, Terry McConnell, and Don Robbins are exempt from the limit on informal runs.
Rule changes this year: Outside times must be submitted within one month of when they were run. (Events run before the draft dinner must be submitted within one month of the draft dinner.) A runner must finish a total of 6 official league events on 6 separate days before their points count towards their team total. A total of 4 outside events can be counted towards a runner's individual and team totals. There is no longer a restriction on the number of OIN (Non-SU) runners on a team. If you do two official runs in the same week (now possible because of the Thursday option to run an event from 12-1 on any track in Onondaga county when there is a Friday run in Manley) both count as official runs. (These changes were proposed by an ad-hoc committee consisting of Jeff Carnes, Sue Leone, Rachel May, Sam Sampere, and Don Robbins.)
Rule changes this year:
This was the year we first got to enjoy the new Manley track, of which the best that can be said is that the distance in lane 1 (whatever it is) never changes.
Sadly, this was also the year we said goodbye to longtime league member Allen Drew.
Rule changes this year: Relay events of 1, 2, or 3 laps per leg of the new Manley track may substitute for the 800r, 1600r, and 3200r events. The 5 mile run may be substituted for the 8k/10k event, and will be scored by 5 mile standards.
"They say there's a really nice track under those bleachers." - Miklos Gratzer
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. Allow the distance event to be run at any of the distances 15k, 10M, hmar, or mar, and score each according to the standard for that event.
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: Beginning next year, allow the distance event to be run at any of the distances 15k, 10M, hmar, or mar, and score each according to the standard for that event.
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 can be added to each team. The 55m dash may be substituted for the 100m dash.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Rule Changes: The 1500m run may be substituted for the mile run.
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. Scores are now rounded to the next lower half point.
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. The rule that counted the 15k and 100m as a single event also went away and was mourned by Tom Fondy, but probably by few others.
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.
Standards introduced in August 1993. These were based on recently released WAVA (World Association of Veteran Athletes) age group standards and were adapted to our new 10 point scoring system by Ed Stabler. (WAVA had developed and published its first set of standards in National Masters News in 1989. Our standards are based upon the revision of 1991.)
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.
This was the last year of the six point scoring scale (see link below.) The 8k was added this year.
The last version of the six point scoring standards
At the draft dinner captain Jabbour of Q/Q (quantity over quality) confidently vowed that he would win the league by dint of sheer numbers. But it was numbers man Jack Ucci and his 2nd Derivatives who showed that quality stills counts for something.
Scoring Standards used in 1989-90. The standards used from 88-89 to 92-3 were on a six point scale and were based on age-group world records. Ed Stabler kept track of these records and issued a new set of standards whenever there were new records, which was pretty much every year. For 6 points one had to run at a speed equal to or better than 85% of world record speed. For 5,4,3, and 2 points the percentages were 80%, 75%, 70%, and 65%. All slower performances earned 1 point, called a participation point. (Points earned in excess of one point were called quality points.)
This was a landmark season. Before this year there were set teams representing various units at SU, as well as a catch-all "outside industries" team. Problem was, the same team (Arts and Sciences) won every year, simply because it was the biggest. Interest in the format had begun to wane when Commish Nick Wetter had a brainstorm. Inspired, he says, by Fantasy Football, he proposed having a new set of captains each year who would invent team names and choose sides at the Fall banquet. The idea caught on and the resulting format became the standard in all subsequent years. Also this year, we moved from the old 4 point scoring scale to a six point scale.
In this inaugural year of the new format, Karl Barth's Chaos team won out over the No-shirts, captained by Bruce Fredrickson. (Bruce was famous for running in all sorts of weather - even sub-zero days in February - without a shirt.)
Until the 88-89 season, runs were scored on a 4 point scale based on standards provided by the "Faculty Clearinghouse," a nation-wide faculty competition out of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Every runner got one participation point, and up to 3 additional points for bettering set standards in each age group. The age groups were open, 40-49, and over 50 for men, and open and over 40 for women. Standards for the highest age group were the same for men and women. For example, in the 880y Run, 50+ men and 40+ women had to better 3:15 for 1 quality point, 3:00 for 2, and 2:45 for 3 points.
This season had been missing for many years - no results at all, not even partial results. Finally this gap was closed in May 2017 when complete results were found among a collection of league memorabilia submitted to us by Sam Clemence Thanks, Sam!
League Results (Scanned pdf of mimeograph)
For the first time this season results are kept by a computer program written by Ed Stabler. The program produces results suitable for submission to the national program, which will be revived next year.
League Results (Scanned pdf of mimeograph)
League Results (Scanned pdf of mimeograph)
League Results (Scanned pdf of mimeograph)
Results appear to be incomplete. There is a sheet of Fall semester results, some scattered results from March and April, and a list of the final standings. (Engineering won.)
League Results (Scanned pdf of mimeograph)
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