No M/W20s in the YBT

[Oldman]

Your views are wanted about Orienteering Competitions
Do you have opinions about what is good about the competitions held in orienteering or about how they could be improved?

The Board are looking to get your feedback and opinions about current orienteering competitions, why you enter some and not others, how far you will travel, whether you like to compete against everyone on a course or against your friends or age group, do you like relays or is your preference for individual competitions? And would you like more inter-club competition?

Once this feedback has been gathered there will be opportunity to confirm that the current set of competitions does meet your needs or to shape some changes to the competitions that will meet your needs better. During December and January we will be conducting an online survey to gather your opinions on orienteering competitions. Please let us know your opinions by taking part in the survey.

Mike Hamilton

Survey at http://freeonlinesurveys.com/rendersurv ... bnoa677139

[awk]

Hands off the CST ~ it's a valuable competition for the smaller clubs. Long may it continue.

Actually, I think there is a very strong argument for merging the two competitions (but hold on to your hat Clive!), not least that ability at these competitions is not actually about size, but about the club's strength (otherwise the biggest club would always win).

I've long felt (and have long argued in various reviews) that the competition woujld be much better set up on a league basis, with promotion, relegation etc.

For instance: divide the country up into area leagues, with each league divided into divisions of say 4-5 clubs. Each division would then have its match (equivalent to the qualifiers). Winners would get promoted to the next division for next year, bottom teams relegated. Winners would also then play their opposite numbers from the other areas for national division titles.
Thus you'd get the ODs, SYOs battling out for the Area then National Division 1 titles, other clubs for Division 2, and so on all the way down to Division 5 or even 6.

The whole thing though would depend on a club's strength rather than size, but lower divisions could score fewer runners than higher divisions to recognise that the lower divisions would be dominated by smaller clubs (but not exclusively so!).

I think that sort of thing would give much more incentive, a stronger structure, a more marketable competition (people recognise titles like Western Division 2 winner and National Division 4 winner) and much closer competitions than what we have now.

So yes, I would get rid of the Trophy as it stands, but only because I don't think it and the Cup provide anything like sufficient incentive or interest in their current format, except for a relatively few clubs. This way, there'd be something for every club, even if it was just to keep their place in a division!

[RJ]

AWK, I am in strong agreement with the thrust of your argument. I would like to see a competition that lasted a little longer than just a single event, or two, with the second one being the final. But to have a competition that, as you say, relies on the strengths of the various clubs, and not on the size.

In the late nineties we had a badge event Galoppen in NWOA, which found the top club each year based on a twenty competitor team. It could be developed to work in the new event structure. Each regional event that had ranking status would have those points published with the results. No problem there. Any club that had at least twenty runners taking part, spread over, say, ten age classes, would have a total score generated from the best twenty individual ranking point scores.

Clubs would have team scores obtained at any Level 2 event at any time throughout the year. You can then have an ongoing and constantly changing league with clubs moving up and down depending on the performance in the latest event.

You could have a final event, late in the year, where the ten best scoring clubs compete for the 1/2/3(places) trophies. You could have a second division based on teams with just ten scoring competitors for the smaller clubs.

The idea can be tested using 2010 data to see if it 'works'. If enough clubs can be included in the league using twenty scores then great. Then see if there is an interesting movement of clubs up and down the league as the year progresses.

[RJ]

I wondered how easy it might be to get the data..... well, the Warren Wood event on 31/01/10 gives a WAOC winning score of 19986 against NOC with 17251.

Alice Hodkinson F 1971 1404
Jonathan Cronk M 1992 1235
Ronny Falk M 1970 1182
Anna Falk F 1973 1112
Stephen Borrill M 1971 1084
David Cooper M 1963 1041
Mike Capper M 1955 1028
Ben Holland M 1978 1010
Frances Cooper F 1964 988
Andrew Stimson M 1981 982
Peter Woods M 1957 980
Emma Holland F 1981 967
Ian Smith M 1956 955
Tony Wilson M 1949 933
Robin Bourne M 1962 911
Chris Morley M 1940 909
Maurice Hemingway M 1955 832
Rakesh Chandraker M 1962 823
Peter Howsam M 1950 823
Helen Bickle F 1982 787 19986

Lost the tabulation but never mind. Problem about juniors and their scores, but then I think they are calculated but just not made available. Change that??

[graeme]

It seems the new ranking list opens lots of possibilities.
People outside orienteering often ask "who won?". RJ's idea gives a clean answer: "WAOC", as opposed to some extended discussion of ages/classes/courses etc. It can be applied to any (every?) ranking event, and should have good potential for local publicity "WAOC win Warren Wood, NOC nowhere". Best of all, it doesn't need to have a million finickity eligibility rules.

but it will once the BOF committee structure gets hold of it

[SeanC]

Another possibility is to answer the question "which club is the best club in the country?" if measured by the sum of the clubs ranking points*.

No need to involve BOF. Anyone capable and willing to dump the current ranking list into a spreadsheet and perform the necessary sums can give us all the answer today.

Other variations

- what is the best uni club?
- what is the best club for old fogies?
- what is the most improved club?

etc etc etc

* ignoring juniors

[DJM]

But doesn't this measure how many M21s you have instead? As they, in general, score the most points.

To be fairer, wouldn't you have to introduce some sort of age weighting so that good W55s can contribute too? And, currently, the rankings exclude the U18s also ...

[Scott]

Another possibility is to answer the question "which club is the best club in the country?" if measured by the sum of the clubs ranking points*.

No need to involve BOF. Anyone capable and willing to dump the current ranking list into a spreadsheet and perform the necessary sums can give us all the answer today.

Ollie already made a thing that does more-or-less that.

[Mrs H]

Ollie is so clever - if only he had access to the top secret junior ranking list he could make that system do anything you wanted - infact we'd hardly need to turn up at all

But you definitely need those juniors before you can make the final call.

[Ed]

But doesn't this measure how many M21s you have instead? As they, in general, score the most points.

To be fairer, wouldn't you have to introduce some sort of age weighting so that good W55s can contribute too? And, currently, the rankings exclude the U18s also ...

Age weighting should be fairly simple: take the mean points for each age class (or some subset such as the top 20 ranked from that class) and then normalise the points within each age class based on that (scale it so that the mean in all classes is 1000) and sum the normalised points.

Not sure that any statistician would approve, but as a quick and easy method to get something fairly reasonable then it should work.

[graeme]

To be fairer, wouldn't you have to introduce some sort of age weighting so that good W55s can contribute too?

Why age? Those of us who've been orienteering for 20 years tend to score more points too:!:
The fairest way to handicap is, of course, to use the ranking list , which should tell you who actually had a good run...
...and averaged over the year, it gives a giant tie - and what could be fairer than that

On the other hand, OllieScoring TM tells us that INT has the best men in the country, so it must be true.

[RJ]

The Ranking points start to give a really good competition..... Blidworth on 07/02/2010 gives

Using teams of best fifteen scores
SYO 17159
DVO 16586
OD 15924
NOC 15489
LEI 14773
HOC 14485
EPOC 13104
AIRE 12722
EBOR 12533

And with the best twenty scores
SYO 21867
DVO 21475
NOC 20038
OD 19878
LEI 18516

There are quite a few clubs that are short of one or two counting runners. What a good nechanism this would be to increase attendance, and to increase membership (because of access to your own ranking points)

As the year progresses new events will give new team scores, and a change in the league standings. And, in fact, you only need one team score during the course of the year to be included, and that could be earned at the regional event closest to you. As graeme says, the quality of that information for press coverage is immense.

And with the team named, as in the example in my first posting, there is the reward of being in the winning scoring team. Great for club morale!

[Sunlit Forres]

But doesn't this measure how many M21s you have instead? As they, in general, score the most points.

To be fairer, wouldn't you have to introduce some sort of age weighting so that good W55s can contribute too? And, currently, the rankings exclude the U18s also ...

Wouldn't that be the point of the competition - to see who's the best orienteering club? To be best at orientering you need to be accurate and fast so why can't we make it simple and reward speed and accuracy. If that means the younger runners provide most of the counters then so be it. Go out there and recruit a load of M21s and we might address the paucity of orienteers in that age bracket.

While M/W21s, potentially, are fastest, there are plenty 50+s out there whose skill makes up for their loss of pace over time. Besides, us 50-somethings have had our chance to be top-flight M21s when we were younger. As we get older I don't believe we need the incentive of being competitive to get our rewards from orienteering - I personally get plenty satisfaction from seeing, and helping, up-and-coming members reach their potential. I would love to be in a club of 25-year-old sub-35 minute 10K runners who wanted to become skilled orienteers (especially if they were all ladies).

And if I were in such a club, I'd find it a personal challenge to get amongst them!

[Clive Coles]

I quite liked AUK's original suggestion of a league system.

For instance: divide the country up into area leagues, with each league divided into divisions of say 4-5 clubs. Each division would then have its match (equivalent to the qualifiers)

.

The important thing for me is that clubs within a region , of comparable standing (what ever that means) are scored against each other.

But, on reflection,the idea started to loose my support. I think we need to face up to the fact that fewer orienteers are prepared to travel to competitions outside their area.

Once you start promoting clubs into higher divisions you start to pitch clubs against each other who otherwise are unlikely to ever meet at an event. You therefore have to derive the scores from the ranking system ~ by so doing you remove the head to head challenge from the competition.

That seems to me to be the weakness of a national league system. A great idea for the big clubs who tend to have sufficient members who are prepared to travel, but less attractive for the smaller clubs.

Local rivaly is a key component to a competition. Once it becomes reduced to a statistical evaluation it becomes a "so what" competition.

The current CSC/T does in my mind have some problems as well. Once a club has won their regional qualification round there is excitement and a sense of achievement within the club. This then dissipates as the final is often delayed until the autumn. By the time the final is held everyone else in other clubs has forgotten who is in the final. Another "so what" situation.

[geomorph]

The important thing for me is that clubs within a region , of comparable standing (what ever that means) are scored against each other.

Local rivaly is a key component to a competition. Once it becomes reduced to a statistical evaluation it becomes a "so what" competition.

I think the principle behind Ollie's compilation is great. But I agree with CC that there is a need to promote local rivalries as well, and that for me means an Ollie-style league using level 2 and 3 events within a 'region' of contiguous club areas. For instance in the Midlands an EMOA scheme could be open to WAOC, SMOC and OD (not SYO for obvious reasons ) as well as the EMOA clubs. Events already sanctioned as part of the EMOA league would count, as would some others staged by the invited clubs

Does the scheme even need to be sanctioned by a region? No, just between clubs who want to promote this sort of rivalry. That's the great thing our electronic results. A few tweaks, a simple points allocator (does not need to be as clever as ranking points), and a trawler/consolidator like Ollie's and you have a league.

edit: and of course if the scoring is NRS-independent as the EMOA individual league is, then JUNIORS play an important part in the club league, and that is a great thing