How to handle avg age grade for small 1-29 team

[SteveDesmond-ca]

I noticed the 1-29 team is rather small this year, which may give an unintended advantage with the "average age grade" team score calculation.

Options, in probably order of fairness:

• leave it as is, with the assumption that their boosted age grade points will compensate for their low mileage points
• reduce the number of athletes in a team's avg age grade calculation for a course to the team with the least number of runners (so e.g. for 1600 this year, right now only top 2 from each team count towards their avg age grade, since only 2 1-29 runners have run it)
• merge the 1-29 and 30-39 teams (probably not ideal since 30-39 is already the biggest)

[SteveDesmond-ca]

Just checked to see that this is still an issue as we're meeting the end, but the only course that's really affected is Treman since that's the only one where 1-29 isn't in last for age grade anyway.

I think the best solution (other than just ignoring it😅) may actually be to fill in the missing age grades with 0's, so e.g. for the mile, they'd have the 7 fastest age grades that were actually run, and then add 3 0's to make 10 records.

We're doing something similar elsewhere in some scoring algorithm, but can't remember exactly where. Thoughts @adamengst?

[adamengst]

Given that it's clearly not going to affect anything, I'm cool with just leaving it be. But I tend to agree with you that filling in the missing records with 0's is the best option, since that's the negative that should cause the team to encourage more completions. Thanks for staying on top of this!

[SteveDesmond-ca]

Implemented in 6806539 -- no visible change as team 1-29 already dropped to last on Treman