All-Area teams

I have done All-Area teams in football, volleyball, basketball, soccer, baseball and softball in the past. I'm attempting to do a track one now. Should I do it by event or the best 11 athletes on each team.

Any of you ever done an all-area track team and if so how did you do it. Looking for helpful suggestions.

 

If you must do one, I'd go per event.
Why would you take the best 11 from each team?

 

Not 11 on each team, I mean like Top 11 on the first team, 11 on second and then honorable mention.

 

Probably depends how the talent in your area breaks down.

If you have five 100 dashers who made the state finals, hard to leave any of them off.

Conversely, if you have some distance runners who were good in area, but sucked in state, hard to put them on the team.

 

Track's not a big deal here, so I don't do an All-Area for it, but what I'd recommend is a fixed number of individuals, let's say 10 girls and 10 boys regardless of event, per team, then the top two relays, boys and girls, for each team.

 

Thanks for all your suggestions.

 

I'm guessing you didn't have a (county, area, city) meet that would make it easy just to make the event winners from that meet all area?

 

Its a handful of schools representing three seperate counties.

 

That's how my paper and others in the state do it. All-State is generally based on the results from the state Meet of Champions, and the various county teams on those meets -- which sometimes leads to interesting selections when the same kid wins multiple races. My paper maintains a performance list from all the major meets, which works as a pretty good tiebreaker.

 

We have nine high schools spread out over our state's four track divisions and what we do for our all-area team is simple.

We base it entirely on the state championship meet.

Everyone has an equal chance to qualify for it, everyone has an equal chance to make our team.

We pick the top relay team and, until recently, used to pick four track and four field athletes. Now, because our area's talent keeps fluctuating, we do the top eight athletes, an MVP and a relay team.

Usually, we end up with our MVP winning two-three events, about two-three other winners on the team and a handful of top-six regional qualifiers filling out the last spots.

 

We don't do an all-area team for track because we typically have 30 to 40 people combined in our area qualify for state and give them plenty of coverage not only in Austin, but also with a full preview page.

Last week we had seven people win gold medals. We let the hardware speak.

 

Track is probably the easiest sport to select a team for ... if you are inclined to do an all-area team.

My least favorite is tennis with coaches pushing the unbeaten No.5 singles player, etc. Volleyball is a close second. Hard to really compare.