Analyzing Maxprep's High School Team Performance

[draggingwalt]

My apologies if this post doesn't belong here. I figured this would be more of interest to the statistically-inclined than in the high school forum.

I'm a social scientist and am currently doing research on how the quality of boys and girls basketball teams vary by state and school size. I have Jeff Sagarin's data on Indiana schools, and have done some preliminary analyses. My work suggests that small schools tend to produce a disproportionate number of very weak girls teams. http://draggingwalton.net/uncategorized ... athletics/

Your documentary provided a nice counterpoint, suggesting that there are small (and presumably conservative on the whole) communities who vigorously support women's athletics. Ken Massey was kind enough to share his ranking data from maxpreps.com for all 50 states. Recalling the excellent documentary Class C, I wanted to look up the small high schools (<200 students) featured.

I was a bit surprised to see some very small Class C schools (e.g., Twin Bridges and Belt) ranked among the top ten schools in the entire state: http://www.maxpreps.com/rankings/girls- ... ontana.htm

I understand that these Class C schools work extremely hard and are very dedicated to building strong programs, but I'm a bit skeptical that schools as small and remote as Class C school can compete with the largest high schools in the state. If Class C athletics were among the best in the entire state, then why bother having a Class C? There are many high schools in Montana with over 1000 students. I wrote Massey about this, and while he did say that there are few games to connect Class C schools with other leagues, he was inclined to trust his model. That is the correct thing to do as a scientist, but I'm still skeptical that such small and remote high schools can be among the best in the state consistently.

Once again, I apologize if I've posted this on the wrong forum. I'm not sure what niches outside of the gambling community exist for the analytics-inclined sports fan outside of the NBA/APBRmetrics folks.

Thanks in advanced for any and all thoughts and responses; I presume there's people here who have given power rankings a lot of thought.