My fantasy cross country league

What are fantasy sports?

Every year, millions of people, myself included, play fantasy sports. As a high school athlete, I wanted to incorporate my passion for fantasy sports into my own sport, cross country. How did I do this? First, we need an understanding of how fantasy sports work. Traditionally, fantasy sports are a unique way for fans to be involved in professional sports by competing against one another. At the beginning of the season, everyone drafts players from a professional league (football, basketball, etc.) and creates a roster. There are two very common methods for drafting. First is the traditional snake draft. The snake draft follows a pattern of ABCDE, EDCBA, ABCDE, etc. (rounds 1, 2, 3). Each player gets to pick one player per round, and all teams will have the same number of players at the end. The other most common method of fantasy drafting is the salary cap draft. Here, every person is allotted a certain budget, and can make as many bids as they like on each player. Their team can have any number of players on their team at the end, as long as they only spent within their budget throughout the draft. Every week, each team plays against one other team in the league. Every team gains or loses points based on the performance of the professional players on their team. This is done using the player’s statistics during the game(s), and each player will receive a score, which reflects how well they did. At the end of the season, each team has a win-loss record, because they either won or lost every week. Most fantasy leagues reserve the last two weeks of the season for playoffs, where the four best teams play in semifinals and then finals. 

How does cross country work?

On the other hand, high school cross country is not very similar to professional sports at all, and also needs to be understood in order to make sense of fantasy cross country. The season consists of series of meets, about ten across two months. Something very convenient and fortunate about high school cross country is that every runner runs the same set of races. At every meet, every runner runs the same course and receives a time (obviously, a lower time is better). Every course is of a different length and has varying conditions, so it is very difficult to compare one’s performance across multiple meets just by looking at their time. The season consists of two different kinds of meets. League meets, which take place on weekdays, have the same set of schools every time and count towards earning points in the league (schools can be promoted or relegated). Invitationals take place on weekends, and have dozens of random schools participating (often take place very far away). The most notable thing about invitational meets is the fact that runners can receive medals for their performance in a specific race. At every meet, every runner is placed in a race. The races are originally split between boys and girls, and then varsity, junior varsity, and frosh-soph. Anyone can run varsity, but it is usually reserved for the best runners. JV is for grades 9-11, and frosh-soph for grades 9-10. Good runners in 9-10th grade will usually run varsity at league meets in order to earn league points, but will switch to frosh-soph during invitations to win medals. While it is possible for good 11th grade runners to be demoted from varsity to JV during invitationals, it is considered unethical and usually never happens. It is generally easy to tell who a better runner is, because everyone runs the same course at a meet. However, it becomes more difficult to compare boys and girls, because time does not always directly reflect who is better. This is a pretty important part of making fantasy cross country, because we have the power of explicitly and objectively knowing how runners perform relatively to one another. This is not true in other fantasy sports, where scoring may not directly correlate with one’s subjective view on a player’s performance. 

How did I combine these?

As someone who passionately plays fantasy sports and runs, I was really interested in finding a way to combine the two. Last year, my friends and I played a very rough version of fantasy cross country for only one meet. We used a simple snake draft, where the four of us received a random order and then drafted teams, each with an equal number of runners. At the end of the meet, we added up the times of the runners on each team, and the team with the best (lowest) combined time won. After deciding to make fantasy cross country a season-long sport with a much more organized setup, I was able to identify the most glaring issues with our previous attempt. The most obvious concern was how it was going to be scored. Simply adding up times would not work for a number of reasons. Firstly, it made having less runners on your team preferable to having more. For example, a team with four runners would be more likely to win than a team with five, which is completely illogical. Secondly, slow runners would be the biggest contributors to a team score (by having the largest times), which also does not make any sense. Finally, boys and girls would contribute disproportionately, irrespective of how good they actually are. This is because “better” runners may run slower times, and are badly represented by a scoring method that only factors that in. When determining how we would now score runners, a notable decision I made was to also disregard separate races entirely. This means I would completely ignore whether a runner ran varsity, junior varsity, or frosh-soph at a meet. The only distinction I made was separating boys and girls. Now, for every meet, I would have two lists, each with the combined results for all boys or all girls. The decision I now had to make was figuring out how exactly I was going to assign a score to each runner at every meet. Ultimately, it was simplest to score runners based on their place rather than time, so I decided to create a system that would score runners based solely upon their position among everyone in their gender. From here it was relatively easy. Every runner received a score at every meet from 0-100. The fastest overall runner among boys and girls each receive 100 points, while the slowest receives a 0. This system was most effective for simply prioritizing faster runners, while also scoring boys and girls equally. This also provided a way for scoring to remain consistent between meets, as a winning time at one meet may be much slower than a winning time at another, due to the different course lengths. An unforeseen circumstance using this method was that most players’ scores would remain largely similar throughout the season, and it would not do a good job of replicating the good day/bad day aspect of other fantasy sports, where players can score extremely high or low on any given day. While there was no perfect way to have this in our league, the best solution was to incorporate a scoring bonus for players whenever they broke a season record of theirs. For example, if a player scored in the sequence [90, 85, 95] during their first three meets, they would have set a season record in the third meet. Their previous season high was 90, and they improved by 5 points. This 5 point season record (SR) is rewarded with a 10 point bonus (double the SR amount), moving their score from 95 to 105. Note that while a player’s original score is restricted to 100, their score after the bonus can exceed 100. The next change I needed to make from the original fantasy league was to find a new method of selecting teams. While the snake draft would have functioned, it have involved minimal strategy, as a general ranking of players would essentially be known before the draft. Furthermore, it was decided that the league should leave no runners undrafted, so a snake draft would risk players unfairly having different sized rosters. 

Combining strategy and equity led to my personal favorite draft method, the auction. While many different versions of the auction were considered, I found it best to use the generic unlimited-bid auction, as most fantasy leagues do. Each person receives a $100 (fake money) draft budget, and can spend it however they like. This introduces much more strategy than the snake draft, while allowing for teams with unequal amounts of players to be more balanced. The final decision to be made was how a winner would be determined at the end of the season. While it was obviously easiest to simply calculate each person’s total season points and determine a winner, this makes the season less interesting and nullifies the SR bonuses. I instead opted for the typical fantasy season of weekly (“meetly”, in this case) head-to-head matchups, with the top four teams in win-loss record qualifying for the semifinals and finals during the last meets of the season. I’m very optimistic about the inaugural season of fantasy cross country and I look forward to many more!