2012 Urban Speculation

[Caz]

With 2012 fast approaching, what is the speculation as to what might or might not be in the Nopesport League next year?
From Edinburgh University's site, they claim they are in.....How do they know when nothing has been announced?
Have found the following Urbans dates in our club calendar for next year, please feel free to add more to my list and debate:

Saturday 21st January Edinburgh
Saturday 3rd March Cardiff
Sunday 4th March St Andrews
Saturday 10th March Great Malvern
Saturday 21st April Huntingdon
Monday 7th May Kendal
Saturday 12th May Settle
Sunday 24th June Canterbury
Sunday 8th July Nottingham
Saturday 28th July Aberystwyth
Saturday 25th August Guildford
Sunday 2nd September Lincoln
Saturday 22nd September London
Saturday 29th September Carlisle
Sunday 30th September Windsor & Eton

[smf]

Sunday 4th March St Andrews

Is in the 2012 Nopesport league. We got permission last week to include NUL in our event flyers, which we started to hand out last weekend.

[SIman]

I checked with Brooner a couple of days ago and he said

Edinburgh is kicking off the NUL again and we want to introduce Ultravets at M/W65.

[Caz]

I was hoping St Andrews would not be part of it as I love going there but it coincides with my skiing holiday.

[andy]

I was hoping St Andrews would not be part of it as I love going there but it coincides with my skiing holiday.

cancel your holiday then...

[Roger]

Caz: your club list omits

Sunday 26 August Basingstoke
Monday 27 August Didcot

I don't know whether or not either of these will be included, but I expect London to be excluded (again): it doesn't need any boost from inclusion in the Nopesport Urban League, and with so many participants there just aren't enough start slots to accommodate the more populous NUL categories on a single course.

[Caz]

So August Bank Holiday Urban Fest in the South East

[Scott]

I've heard rumours of something afoot in Brizzle, but I'm not sure whether that was for 2012 or 2013.

Anybody know whether St Albans is happening next year?

[awk]

4 more dates I know of:

Sun 27 May Claro @ Knaresborough
Mon 4 Jun Ebor @ York
Sat 27 Oct: Aire Fat Rascal 1 - Chasing Sprint @ Holt Park (complex urban estate) and Golden Acre Park (interesting formal/informal park), Leeds
Sun 28 Oct: Aire Fat Rascal 2 - Yeadon (N.W. Leeds)

[King Penguin]

Sat 10 November - Castle Vale, Birmingham
(now registered on BOF website; slight delay due to having to reschedule as original date clashed with London !)

[Jayne]

hmmm, definitely enough races for a Southern Urban League ...

[Caz]

hmmm, definitely enough races for a Southern Urban League ...

That sounds like a fine idea. Wonder how that would be taken it forward......

[NeilC]

Whilst I love Urban Races I'm not yet prepared to travel the length of the country (we live on the South Coast) in order to take the NUL seriously. If however there were regional leagues (sub-sets of the main one?) I'd be very interested. I'm sure Roger's Excel skills would be up to it if the NOPE masters were supportive.

[andypat]

NOt sure you'd need it to be a subset - I'd imagine if it was regional you'd want to include more local races too - a bit like the Yorkshire one maybe? I'm pretty sure we'd have enough for a Scottish one if only someone could be persuaded to put together a spreadsheet!

[Roger]

I'm sure Roger's Excel skills would be up to it if the NOPE masters were supportive.

Now that the organisers upload CSV results files and runners are indexed by BOF number, results processing relies on ColdFusion and SQL skills rather than the time-consuming and error-prone de-duplication in Excel. ( to EddieH by the way for doing it the hard way this year for the UK Masters Cup. He's now seen the light.) Calculating the points and storing them to a database is already done automatically. All that's left to program is defining which races belong in which league (and how many to score), and extracting different sets of results for different leagues.

Provided that someone is willing to

* define the races

* liaise with the organisers of any non-NUL races to ensure that they use the standard categories and can upload the results files

then I'm willing to set up the scoring. This goes for as many regions (within reason!) as wish to do it, so we could have South and Scotland as well as Yorkshire. Keep to the existing NUL scoring system though please, and competitors must be identified by BOF number. Finding a sponsor and / or having end-of-season prizes would be a bonus but isn't necessary.

Any takers?

(The results files can be either a custom 7-field format that I defined for the Urban League, or the 'OE splits' format, as used for Splitsbrowser and I believe BOF rankings.)