Meet results still need tweaks

By DAWN REISS
Published September 19, 2006

LECANTO - Three days after the Lecanto Invitational and some of the names of the female finishers are still a mystery.

Lecanto coach Dan Epstein hopes the Florida running community will help him out. Though the final girls results are not accurate, Epstein said Monday he would post the Lecanto Invitational results on flrunners.com by Tuesday morning "and I'm hoping coaches will see what's wrong and let me know."

Epstein said he realized three of the varsity female finishers' names were missing when he looked at the time of Jillian Swartz, his top finisher on Saturday. "She ran a 22.59 and finished 40th," he said. "She was listed as running the course is 22.49 for 37th place, so I knew we missed three girls. I was quite upset."

Epstein said the problem happened at the finish, where girls were given place cards but stepped out of the "shoot," a taped-off pathway runners funneled into after the race, instead of standing in the order they finished. Epstein said several Niceville runners stepped out of the shoot before volunteers wrote down their names and times. As a result, the runners weren't calculated into the finish.

Epstein said Wharton's girls team, which originally finished second behind Lourdes Academy, was actually below Niceville, the true second-place finisher.

Epstein said the final team and individual results were all inaccurate after the race, except for the JV girls. Epstein has since corrected the boys results and said it did not affect the original list of boys team finishes.

[Last modified September 19, 2006, 01:31:13]