The Darien Times

State crown take-back: ‘This has happened to us before’

Written by Steven Buono
Friday, February 17, 2012 02:11 PM

Girls Indoor Track

“There was an announcement, ‘the team that was disqualified please return the medals,’” said Darien girls track coach Steve Norris.

And he wasn’t even talking about this week’s CIAC take-back of the Class L crown, denied Darien due to a “data entry error.”

No — he was talking about events four years back.

“So we’re used to it,” he added.

Darien walked away from the state meet in New Haven on Monday narrow champs, beating out Windsor by 1.5 points.

But an admitted judges error in feeding in data while tallying the pole vault event meant that when the fault was discovered, by the CIAC, Darien had a fourth place dropped to seventh. And that’s all it took to flip the results to a 71-70 Windsor win.

“I would think the equitable thing to do would be for the CIAC to award co-championships,” said Norris. “Because they didn’t catch that error for two days.”

Darien’s 72.50-71 point championship victory over second place Windsor was overturned by the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference on Wednesday, leaving DHS the runner-up.

The call

The following release was sent out by the CIAC notifying teams and the press of the change.

“During the seeding of the state open it was discovered that a data input error had caused incorrect results to be distributed at Monday's Class L Championship Meet and subsequently be posted on the CIAC website.

A Darien girls pole vaulter was listed in a four-way tie for third, which would have been worth 3.5 points for the team.

During the seeding for the open it was determined the vaulter should actually have been listed in 7th place due to the number of misses tiebreaker.

A subsequent review of the official score sheet from the judges showed this was in fact the case, but that the data had been incorrectly transferred to the scoring system.

The girls pole vault results and the team scores for the meet have been corrected.

As a result of the correction, Windsor High School is now correctly reflected as the champion with 71 points and Darien High School the runner-up with 70 points."

A closer look

Said Norris: “The data entry people, they are the timing service. They sit at the finish line with their computer and their electric camera focused on the finish line, and time the races.

“And when the field event results come in off of the original sheet, they look at those results and they manually type them into their computer.

“And they didn’t look at it closely.”

The margin for winning was close enough for closer scrutiny of the facts and figures?

“They were in a rush,” Norris added. “And they just did a sloppy job. And there’s nobody there to check them on it. There’s no fail safe.”

Upsetting for DHS, but Norris’ got practice at it, as he recalled 2008.

“This has happened to us before, we’ve won and then lost — some time later — due to official’s error,” Norris said. “The 4x100 relay, we crossed the finish line first and were disqualified. But we weren’t notified.

“Results were published, we were given out medals, all-state pictures were taken... We weren’t officially notified we were disqualified. We found out a couple of hours after the race, just by accident.”

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