Should under 16's be on the ranking list

[SeanC]

Over on the UKOL thread Angry Haggis showed us this link http://www.runbritainrankings.com/runne ... teid=11736. Search through this website and you'll see that juniors from under 11 class have a national ranking list for running. But in orienteering juniors have to wait till they are 16. Has orienteering got this right?

Just to recap in case people don't know, White to Light Green* aren't ranked.

*I think

[greywolf]

Yes they should

Two errors in your quiz/post: it's only top year M/W16s in the list, not all, and all courses can be ranked if they have at least 10 ranked finishers, which usually rules out white, yellow & orange.

The rankings working group wanted to exclude W, Y & O completely but BOF couldn't be arsed (If you exclude LGreen then you rule out half the events in Englandshire ). RWG also recommended (based on overwhelming support in consultation) that all competitors on eligible courses be ranked, but BOF chose to listen to a committee whose members seemed not to have read (or understood) the proposal, as they didn't appear to register that juniors would be ranked on the courses that they themselves recommended as suitable, and wittered on about fragile juniors running up on inappropriate courses...

[MIE]

Just to recap in case people don't know, White to Light Green* aren't ranked.

*I think

Er No!!

Ranking points on the above courses are not "normally" given because not
enough competitors in the correct age groups AND who are BO members
run those courses. Sometimes Light Green runners do get ranking points.

If 10 M21's wanted to do a sprint around a White course then they would
be awarded ranking points for their efforts

(Plus what Greywolf beat me to saying, whilst I was saying it)

[andypat]

My wife has been ranked on big orange courses - eg 6 days I think. Whatever the reason for not ranking U-16s, I think it must be dispiriting for those who do well on courses where adults are ranked, not to get points themselves.

As a coach I think its perfectly possible to have a performance measure, without having a win at all costs mentality.

Other sports such as football have a far bigger problem than orienteering with the win at all costs thing.

[SeanC]

And now, after removing the question that doesn't make sense (that no-one has voted for), all the votes have disappeared apart from my own.

I'll get my coat.

[DM]

This gets done to death about every 2 years and the conclusion is normally, yes all should be included, with questions being raised to whoever is in BO office/ relevant committee at the time, with the answer normally being " we should not be getting the juniors to compare themselves against others.....etc etc", while at the same time OKing M16s competing on blue courses, making a large leap up from light greens they were running at M14 (I mean at the big events).

Hope the responses will be the same this time, but that the outcome generates a change in thinking.

[graeme]

"Yes".
But I suspect it's not a change in thinking that's needed. Rather that BOF bought some software and have no idea how it works / how to change it.

[EddieH]

In my view white yellow and orange should not be ranked (although a number of current ranking events never get above orange standard!)

Anyone that runsa ranking course should be included - I've no time for some absurd notion of child protection that wants to exclude competition.

[greywolf]

There are a number of good reasons why White, Yellow & Orange courses should not be ranked (and if they were excluded then this would keep most younger juniors off the rankings list), including
[*]Fairness: there's usually no way of knowing whether v young juniors and novices on these courses have competed on their own, been shadowed or actively helped, and
[*]Unpredictability: the rankings algorithm relies on a reasonable degree of predictability, based on past results (this is why incorrect competitor ID causes such problems) so awarding ranking points for courses populated largely by novices (prone to huge random mistakes and with little past history) is very likely to produce anomalous scores.

In contrast whilst sprint events are very often TD3, the competitors tend to be experienced orienteers, so the distribution of times (and ranking points) is much more predictable

[greywolf]

at our most recent event the standout result wasn't Mharky winning the SEDS race on Brown but the primary school lad doing his first Green course who finished 3rd, less than 2 mins behind the winner. Seems absurd that it's ok for him and the M14s who finished 5th and 6th to run the course when they're clearly capable of doing so, but they then have to be airbrushed out of the rankings calculations...

[SeanC]

It's a real pity that juniors don't get ranked. Picking on SEOA as an example, many clubs have decent local leagues with popular junior competitions. But the question is where do they go from there? SEOA forest level C's and B's have few juniors, even though the forests are much better. That leaves only the very occasional YBT/Peter Palmer competitions (which many can't get too because of club situation), or the big far away events such as JK (which many can't get to because they are too expensive, or not in an orienteering holiday type family).

Junior rankings would have enabled SEOA juniors the opportunity to compete against juniors across the country, without having to leave their region or county.

But I suspect it's not a change in thinking that's needed. Rather that BOF bought some software and have no idea how it works / how to change it.

Putting on my software engineer hat, the standard response to this situation is to say that all things are possible in software*.

* if you're willing to pay for it or can find volunteer(s) to do it for free.

[DJM]

Like greywolf, I was also on the RWP some time ago and I fully agree with him (and others in this thread) that anyone who runs a "rankable" course should be ranked, irrespective of age. Most sane orienteers would define "rankable" as applying to TD4 and above courses, along with all Sprint courses apart, perhaps, from the very junior Sprints such as at the JK.

Thus White, Yellow and Orange would not be ranked, whilst LG and above would, and this is what the RWG proposed. However, software is not as clever as we are, courses are not always labelled White, Yellow, etc and it seems that there was no foolproof way of teaching the software to be able to distinguish between "rankable" and "non-rankable" courses.

So then someone observed that, if the youngest competitors were not given rankings points, then this would eliminate virtually all the "non-rankable" courses from being ranked as only in extraordinary circumstances would there be 10 or more previously ranked runners on the course.

So, unfortunately, the inevitable consequence of ranking juniors would be that many Orange courses would then begin to count for rankings, and there may even be an eventual spread to Yellow courses.

Final point: I am a fully paid-up member of the apostrophe police; am I the only one who cringes when they see the title of this thread?

[Tim]

When I started out as a junior in the very early 1980s the rankings used to rank everyone. Shortly afterwards it was decided that rankings were too competitive and would harm juniors. What danger I was in was never very clear and they didn’t appear to do me any harm, it was just residual 1970s wishy-washy anti-competition in sport patronizing nonsense (there was even serious discussion about stopping timing juniors!). In a competitive sport I never understood the logic of why racing against people every weekend was ok but being ranked against them was not. Any junior of any age can comprehend that rankings will never be perfect and know who the best guys and girls are anyway.

Now along with the pressure/harm argument which still lurks out there in BO, there are a plethora of software/calculation arguments which you can have in proportion in the growth of computer power. I’m happy for others to discuss how many angels you can fit on the head of the pin, but I don't see the problem with a few anomalies which might result from widely varying performances or low TD courses. Widely varying performance is the joy of being a junior – you set out every race in the knowledge that there is a chance you might actually beat the best – what’s wrong with reflecting that in the rankings. And if you rank all courses there would be no pressure to run up on a TD4 course before you were ready.

As 93% say, if it moves rank it.

[graeme]

Final point:

I is the first person and aye, I always dot is too.

[DJM]

When I started out as a junior in the very early 1980s the rankings used to rank everyone.

The National Rankings, sponsored by Peter Dominic, started in 1981. They were later sponsored by TSB and finally published under the auspices of BOF. The youngest age class which has ever been on these lists was M/W19 which then became M/W20. I'm not sure that BOF had a rankings system before 1981 but no doubt someone will correct this if I'm wrong!

So at least juniors are better off now than they were 30 years ago ...