NY Times Sunday article on Susan Von der Lippe

Swimmer Bill...as I told Mr. Commings this morning, my point in calling out the process of voting by SW is that you sometimes have to look beyond only stats/formulas (fire away Chris!) in deciding things like these awards. Paul, I have been working on a project in my spare time that relates to this. I remembered your post and wanted to show you that statistics sometmies is a good thing! I used the (statistically based!) performance rating system described on www.vaswim.org/.../rcalc.cgi and came up with the top 25 USMS swims from LCM and SCM in 2007. To make some attempt to preserve the table formatting, I put it in a text file and have attached it to this message (it works on Notepad for me). It only includes USMS members -- I got the performances from the Top Ten database. Susan does quite well, as you can see. In fact, if you assign points to places (1st gets 25, 2nd 24, etc) and then add them up, you get the following totals Laura Val: 236 Susan Von Der Lippe: 146 Karlyn Pipes-Neilsen: 144 Caroline Krattli: 74 Lois Nochman: 24 Sue Walsh: 14 Rita Simonton: 12 So SVdL comes in 2nd among US women. This omits SCY and non-USMS masters (it wouldn't be very difficult to include the latter, I just hadn't planned on doing so). Still, it is hard to believe that the 2nd best US masters swimmer is not one of the top 12 in the world.

Swimmer Bill...as I told Mr. Commings this morning, my point in calling out the process of voting by SW is that you sometimes have to look beyond only stats/formulas (fire away Chris!) in deciding things like these awards. Paul, I have been working on a project in my spare time that relates to this. I remembered your post and wanted to show you that statistics sometmies is a good thing! I used the (statistically based!) performance rating system described on www.vaswim.org/.../rcalc.cgi and came up with the top 25 USMS swims from LCM and SCM in 2007. To make some attempt to preserve the table formatting, I put it in a text file and have attached it to this message (it works on Notepad for me). It only includes USMS members -- I got the performances from the Top Ten database. Susan does quite well, as you can see. In fact, if you assign points to places (1st gets 25, 2nd 24, etc) and then add them up, you get the following totals Laura Val: 236 Susan Von Der Lippe: 146 Karlyn Pipes-Neilsen: 144 Caroline Krattli: 74 Lois Nochman: 24 Sue Walsh: 14 Rita Simonton: 12 So SVdL comes in 2nd among US women. This omits SCY and non-USMS masters (it wouldn't be very difficult to include the latter, I just hadn't planned on doing so). Still, it is hard to believe that the 2nd best US masters swimmer is not one of the top 12 in the world.