Coldwell Banker Elite Grand Prix Series
By Vic Culp
In my conversations with John Robbins in the 1990s, he conveyed his ideas to promote running in the Fredericksburg Area. Though these recollections are second-hand, I’ll take John’s word. In 1993, John spent many hours at the Rappahannock YMCA. Between workouts and runs, he spent timing irritating Terry McLaughlin. Terry may have planted a seed in John’s mind that John ran with in his first year as founding club president.
Terry ran some West Virginia races in the late 80s and early 90s as part of a four-race series. The races included a 10-mile, a half marathon, a 20-kilometer, and a 15-mile. If you completed all four races, you received a series shirt. That’s a lot of miles and hills for a t-shirt. In the early years of road racing, the only people receiving race shirts were award winners. That changed to finishers and then to registered runners. So, obtaining a shirt for running was unique.
John’s initiative in 1994 was to organize the Big Five series. Before that year, there were five road races in the city: River Run 5km, Organ Donor Awareness 8km in April, Mental Health Awareness 5km in May, Heritage Festival 5 Mile on July 4, and Turkey Trot 5km on Thanksgiving. John wanted to incentivize local runners to participate in all five races with a t-shirt award and travel money to a remote race for the top male and female. Each of the five races paid $100 to the club for the awards.
In March 1994, John and I met with Lee Wolfe and Steve DeShazo of the Free Lance-Star and presented information on the series. Seeing this as a sport rather than recreation, they decided to cover the series with lead-in articles and race coverage throughout the year.
We didn’t figure out how to score the series until after the first race. The finish line procedures, bib number issues, and results processing problems at the River Run dictated the evolution of the series points system. For those a little older (who ran races before RFID timing systems), manual timing methods were used to record finishing. As a runner crossed the finish line, a volunteer pushed a plunger attached to a computer. For each push, a finish time was recorded by place. Then, a finish line volunteer tore the bottom off the runners’ bib numbers. The tear tags were stacked in the sequence of finish place.
After all finishers, a computer operator would enter the numbers on the tear tags in the finish sequence. With no issues, the tags would match precisely with the corresponding times, and results reports were created. That “with no issues” statement is critical in the process. At the River Run, as the first runners were finishing, the perforations on the bib numbers were not of sufficient quality, and the pull tags would not come off in one piece. Fortunately, the organizers figured out a quick workaround: finding a pen and yellow pad to record finish numbers. After I finished the race and entered the computer area, parts of tags and yellow sheets were everywhere. With a lot of work, Don Baxter and I felt we had the sequence of finishers correct. However, my reported time was 15 seconds faster than my actual race time. The person on the plunger made a few extra pushes, and no check times were recorded for adjusting.
Don, Terry, John, and I met early the next week to calculate series scores. Knowing the reported times may not be accurate, we eliminated time from scoring. We threw around some options to base the score only on place. From the start, we split male from female scoring. We determined that each sex was a separate race. The initial idea was to use cross-county scoring, with first place in each race receiving one point, adding a point for each subsequent place. With the general population not understanding low score wins, we eliminated this option. The second idea was to use reverse cross-country scoring, with the last finisher receiving one point and each faster finisher receiving an additional point. We did not like this as larger races would be more critical, and we wanted all races to be weighted equally. The third idea was to give first place in each race 1000 points and subtract 4 points for each subsequent place. At the end of the season, the person with the most points wins. This system is the one we adopted.
In the summer of 1994, major league baseball players went on strike. To fill space, the Free Lance-Star published series standings frequently. That year, we gave series shirts to 34 people who finished all five races and awards to Kurt Kroemer and Janet Scaccio as series winners. The Free Lance-Start included a Sports Section front page article on Black Friday highlighting Janet and Kurt. It helped that both had finished all five races.
Before the 1995 race season began, we held a meeting at Spanky’s (Capital Ale House took over that location) of people interested in presenting ideas that might improve the series. Attendees included John Robbins, Chris Campbell, Dale Saylor, Kevin Breen, Chris Koehler, Matt Boyd, Willard and Betty Dameron, and me.
Kevin Breen of Coldwell Banker Carriage House wanted to sponsor the series and became the title sponsor. Kevin came from Ireland to run cross country at East Tennessee State. He was part of the team that finished second at the 1972 NCAA Cross Country championships. In 1980, he and his partner started a Coldwell Banker brokerage in the old livery stable at 1010 Charles Street. By 1995, he had opened a brokerage on Rt 610 near the Park Ridge subdivision in Stafford County without a partner. In 2004, Kevin changed his brokerage name to Coldwell Banker Elite and started opening offices in and around Fredericksburg. By 2017, he bought his old partner’s downtown office and is now the sole Coldwell Banker franchise in the area. Since 2004, the series has been titled the Coldwell Banker Elite Grand Prix.
Back to the meeting: The first lesson we learned from this meeting is “Don’t hold a meeting in a noisy bar.” The environment didn’t help while talking about subjects passionate to some. Some older meeting participants wanted to use age grading to determine the standings. Because of known timing issues and others’ concerns that age grading was skewed favoring older and younger runners, age grading was eliminated. There was a recommendation to award more points for larger races. We wanted to encourage participation in all races and decided that all races would be scored similarly. We decided to call the series “Grand Prix”. A teacher in attendance corrected me that the word “Gran” did not exist. We wanted to keep the scoring simple for reporting in the press. Thus, points scored would be used for all overall and age group rankings. Also, we would report the total points scored for interim standings rather than average points.
We decided to add two races for 1995, the FARC-operated Downtown Mile and the Colonial Beach 10km. These two events raised the number of races to seven. Matt was concerned that running all seven races may be a competitive issue. His comment, “If you only need to run five of the seven races, I’ll win.” The group decided to use a runner’s best five race scores, and a runner would need to complete at least five races to win an award, including the Grand Prix T-shirt. We created a Master award class and five-year age groups from 14 and under to infinity. So, an 80-year-old runner can win an age group. At that time, we were to award one place per age group. We added the Clydesdale and Athena categories in 2001. Weight requirements have changed throughout the years. Athletes must declare for the category before August 1 of the year. Once declared, they are not eligible for age group awards. They would be allowed to receive a cash award.
In addition to Kevin’s sponsorship, we decided to charge each race a per-runner fee. The total amount was to cover timing services, advertising, and awards. We assigned me as the 1995 Grand Prix Director. We aimed to have every race in the series to have similar quality. For 1995, I leveraged the cash awards. I bought four $350 travel vouchers from US Air, and they donated a fifth one. At the final race in the Grand Prix, we had a drawing from the runners who completed all seven races for that fifth voucher. I continued this arrangement for the years I directed the series.
The Grand Prix Director position was passed onto others, initially David Lewis and Bill Glover. I don’t remember all who managed the series. Eventually, Bert Jacoby, John Timmerman, Jim Christian, Patty Kramer, Matt Boyd, Tracy Dzibela, and Shawn Carrington took responsibility.
1995 was the first year we had a Grand Prix awards dinner, that year at Café DeVanzo. We’ve held one ever since, excluding 2020, at various locations. We’ve done self-pay, potluck, and catered. Venues included the Falmouth Fire Station, Massaponax High School, James Monroe High School, Drew Middle School, Fredericksburg Field House, Brock’s, Fredericksburg Square (now Water’s Edge), and the Expo Center.
Sometime in the ’90s, when the number of finishers per sex in some races was exceeding 200, we decided to change the points system. First place was still 1000 points, and each subsequent place was two points less. After adopting the modified scoring, we adjusted the history to reflect the change.
Over the years, we added races to the series and eliminated others. Most of the drops were from abandoned races. The below chart shows included races by year.
