One of my first posts on this blog was about how the system of scoring works. I mentioned that every member of the team has the potential to influence the outcome of a race. Many of you probably thought, "Here we go, blah, blah, blah, everyone's a winner, blah, blah, blah....." I'm right, aren't I?
Well, at our school's league meet last Friday, we saw a great example of this. There were six schools in the meet, and four of them had complete varsity boys teams (at least five runners). There was a pretty good battle for first place, with the first place and second place teams separated by only 6 points. Then, amazingly, the other two teams tied for third place. When there's a tie, you look at which of the two teams' 6th runners finished higher. In this case, one school had only five runners, and the other did have a 6th. That runner actually finished the race DFL (Dead Flat Last), but because the other team didn't have a 6th runner, he constituted the tiebreaker that secured third place for his team. That's right, the guy who was LAST PLACE in the race was the factor that bumped his team up to a higher place!
The importance of this point is that you should always do your best in any race. Even if it seems like you are the slowest one out there, or if you're having a bad race that day, or if you're down on yourself for some other reason, you should keep trying and get to that finish line. You might be the one that pushes your team up one more spot!
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