Sunday Special: What It Takes To Run In College, Pt. 1

As we start seeing college commitments trickling in, it begs the question that many may be wondering: what kind of times warrant running for a college program?

I've been using the commitments section to record data on Missouri high school runners from 2008-2014 who have gone on to run in more than three college cross-country races or have ran more than two seasons.. So far, I've only collected data on the boys to see how it works, but will collect data and do the same for girls soon.

Here's the year by year breakdown by average:

One thing to note is the chart above is an average of all times, not any sort of standard that must be met. A better, but not exact, representation of that would be to look at the 25th percentile of the times. This is to mean that these times are better than 25% of the data.

These times aren't necessarily a floor a runner must reach either, but it is a good indicator of what a lower rung college recruit might run. We can look at a similar statistic but in the case of a top tier recruit by looking at the 75th percentile, or times that are better than 75% of the data.

These are simply just a collection of runners that ran in college, and doesn't take into account what level they ran at on the college level. Runners could go on to compete in D1, D2, D3, or NAIA programs. Let's take a look at what times it takes to run in each of these divisions starting with D1:

(I'm including the median for anybody interested)

Some of the most common D1 schools: University of Missouri, Southeast Missouri State, Tulsa, and UMKC.

Here's D2:

Most common D2 schools: MSSU, Southwest Baptist, and University of Central Missouri.

One thing to note for D3 is that the sample size was very small compared to the other divisions, so the times might not be entirely accurate for future D3 hopefuls, particularly in the 800.

Most common D3 schools: Washington University in St. Louis, Westminster College, and Webster University.

And finally, NAIA:

Most common D3 schools: Columbia College, Park University, and William Woods.