Update: Current word now from the SCL is the subject may come up at AD’s meeting but meet management believes that the posted results will stand.
If there was a clerical error in the results the National Federation rules only allow up to 48 hours after the meet to correct them since no one from the teams involved is protesting them that time has pasted.

Original post
What’s that you say, the Sonoma County League Championship finished last Saturday?
Yes and no.

Here’s what happened.
Going into the the league championship the standings for the girls, stood at
Piner 6-0
Analy 5-1
Sonoma 4-2
Petaluma 3-3
.
With 3 points for the championship winner, 2 for second and 1 for third, the pennant was on the line.

First surprise of the meet was that Analy, top contender to Piner, did not have a complete team finish the race. Sounds like they had six planned to run but for some reason one did not and another took a fall during the 3rd mile and did not finish. More on that later.

Only four of the SCL’s seven teams had full teams for scoring with El Molino and Elsie Allen joining Analy as incomplete teams.
Team results after the meet are listed as below.

Varsity Girls Team Scores                                    
Rank Team                       Total    1    2    3    4    5   *6   *7                                                                                               
   1 Sonoma   4-2                 40    1    5   10   11   13   19   24                                                               
   2 Petaluma 3-3                 42    3    6    7   12   14   15                                                                  
   3 Piner       6-0                 48    2    4    9   16   17   18   20                                                               
   4 Healdsburg 0-6               99    8   21   22   23   25    
.                 

These results left the pennant standings with Sonoma and Piner tied with 7 points each and Petaluma and Analy tied for third with 5 points each.

Thomas Benjamin is one of a number of running enthusiasts that sends me photos to help illustrate my posts.
Thomas noticed that the photo he took at the finish appears to show an error in the placing between 7th and 8th place.
Here are the top 10 individual results listed for the meet.

Varsity Girls
    Name                    Year School                Avg Mile     Finals  Points
  1 Foster, Molly            11 Analy                6:13      19:15        
  2 Cenci, Hannah           12 Sonoma             6:15      19:20    1   
  3 Romero, Paloma        11 Piner                  6:24      19:48    2   
  4 Franklin, Kirby         12 Petaluma               6:26      19:54    3   
  5 Purcell, Rita             12 Analy                  6:28      20:02        
  6 Villa, Mayra              11 Piner                  6:32      20:15    4   
  7 Biaggi, Gianna            12 Sonoma               6:37      20:30    5 
  8 O'Hanlon, Jessica         10 Petaluma             6:38      20:32    6   
  9 Stypa, Sarah               9 Petaluma               6:40      20:39    7   
 10 Barragan, Maria           12 Healdsburg             6:42      20:44    8   

.
As you can see above the Sonoma runner, Gianna Biagga, is listed ahead of the Petaluma runner, Jessica O’Hanlon, and their teams earning the corresponding points to the far right.
Here is Thomas’ photo of the two girls at the finish. His complete sequence is at the bottom of this page.
The man to the left in the blue shirt next to the doubled up cones is the spot of the finish line.

From this photo it appears that the finish tags placed on the finish order board somehow were reversed.
On Thursday the SCL Commissioner and AD’s will resolve the matter at their meeting.
You might think this a simple fix but federation rules state that the games committee may authorize official pictures to assist in decisions but Thomas was not asked before hand to do that, making them unofficial.

Now if the places do end up getting reversed it has major effects on the outcome of the team results and the pennant race.
Since the final results had Sonoma ahead of Petaluma by 2 pts for 1st place, reversing the two girls, ties the score at 41 points each. The Championship then comes down to the sixth runner on each team, which was won by Petaluma’s freshman Alison Roper.
In total team points towards the pennant this would leave Piner, at 7 pts, as the sole pennant winner with Sonoma and Petaluma each at 6pts.

As historical facts go the only other time a team has earned even a share of a pennant who placed out of the top two in the finals was back in 1982, when the Piner boys tied for the pennant with El Molino after finishing 3rd in the finals. That was also the year the girls race had to be rerun two days later because a race official directed several runners in the wrong direction.

Anyway hopefully Thursday we will have our final answer.

Just for fun I looked at what also almost happened in the meet.
Analy looked to be one of the teams in contention for the championship and the pennant.
As mentioned earlier one of their runners took a bad fall and did not finish.
If she had finished, in under 23:44 for 24th in the team scoring, the Analy runners would have affected the team scoring and caused the final team scores to look like this, figuring the 7th-8th questioned placings are reversed.
Petaluma 52
Sonoma 53
Analy 60
Piner 61
This then would have left a four way tie for the pennant race with all four teams listed above at 6 points.

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