A swap of plaques took place at Ellsworth High School on Tuesday morning to recognize the Eagles’ girls cross-country team as the 2018 Class B North champion.
The brief exchange involving athletic administrators Josh Frost of Ellsworth and Bunky Dow of Mount Desert Island High School of Bar Harbor came three days after the race, which originally concluded with MDI being crowned a one-point (51-52) winner over its Hancock County rival for the regional title.
But when race officials began organizing results from the North and South regional meets later in the weekend in order to seed qualifying runners for the upcoming state championship meet set for Saturday at the Troy A. Howard Middle School in Belfast, they discovered an inconsistency in the submitted times.
While times for the South regional were extended to hundredths of a second, as is the norm, the North times were extended only to tenths of a second.
When the North times were extended to hundredths of a second, that produced a change that left Ellsworth and MDI tied atop the Class B North girls standings, each with 52 points.
The tiebreaker in such cases utilizes each school’s sixth-fastest runner in the race, and Ellsworth senior Miriam Nelson edged her MDI counterpart by three points to give the Eagles the team victory.
“It’s just really an honest setup mistake in transferring the data from the timing system to the scoring system,” said Mike Bisson, assistant executive director of the Maine Principals’ Association.
The mistake took place as the times from the North race were sent in tenths of a second from the timing system to the scoring system, which is set up to accept times out to the hundredth of a second, Bisson said.
“When you send it in tenths it rounds up and ties are randomly assigned, it doesn’t know what else to do with it,” he added.
In this case, senior Ashley Violette of Caribou and junior Rachelle Swanson of MDI originally were listed as tied for ninth place overall, each in a time of 21 minutes, 5.7 seconds.
But when the times were revised to incorporate hundredths of a second, Violette finished ninth and Swanson 10th. When the additional point assigned to Swanson for her updated placement was added to MDI’s team total the Trojans dropped into a 52-52 first-place tie with Ellsworth — requiring use of the tiebreaker.
Ellsworth was led at the regional by junior Caitlin MacPherson, the race winner, along with sophomores Abby Mazgaj (fifth in the team scoring) and Sara Shea (12th), junior Trinity Montigny (13th), seniors Emma McKechnie (21st) and Nelson (36th), and junior Kristen Moseley (56th).
Team scoring for MDI at the regional involved junior Katelyn Osborne (fourth), freshman Grace Munger (eighth), Swanson (10th), senior Olivia Watson (14th), sophomore Olivia Johnson (16th), freshman Azaria Long (39th) and sophomore Cassidy Hanscome (40th).
Both Ellsworth and MDI still qualified for state, as did John Bapst of Bangor, Caribou, Medomak Valley of Waldoboro, Presque Isle and Hermon from the Class B North girls ranks.
“Both schools have handled this so well,” Bisson said. “The kids, the coaches, the ADs, the principals, they all just dealt with it in a classy way.”
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