It's a lot uglier to look at, but you could skip the B1 and C1 cells above by putting this formula in A3 and copying down:

=IF(MAX($A$2:A2)=MID($A$1, FIND("-", $A$1)+2, LEN($A$1))+0, "", MAX($A$2:A2, LEFT($A$1, FIND(" ", $A$1)-1)-1)+1)