Thursday, November 26, 2009

Brisbane Ultimate Blog to Present Prestigious Award Once Again

Well, the heirarchy over at the QUDA HQ have invited Wettie and me to get out the tuxes and once again present the Queensland Ultimate Club of the Year Award at next week's QUDA Bash.

A quick search of this blog will demonstrate the esteemed and growing history of the award. Previous winners include the UQ Lovers (2008), the UQ Lovers (2007) and Bootius Maximus (2006).

The award is determined based on a calculation of club results at tournaments during the year. Here's the rules:

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Qualifying Elements
1. Clubs must play two tournaments, or have travelled over 700km for one tournament.
2. Club must be majority Qld or NNSW players.
Players may play for multiple clubs through the year, but only one club per event.
3. Clubs may accrue additional points via multiple teams in the same event.
4. A tournament must have at least four teams to be included, and be by open invitation/qualification (hence, NUFL not included, as only certain clubs can compete).

Determining Points
1. Points are given for placing in relation to the size of the tournament. Last place gets 100 points, each placing above that gets 100 points, but to 10 teams.
2. If there are more than 10 teams, the maximum points are 1000, and the points per placing distributed down to 100 points for last.
3. Points are given for winning Spirit. Points are calculated as 20 points per team at the tournament - so for example, winning spirit at a 8 team tournament is 160 points.
4. There is a travel bonus to recognise that getting a team a distance takes more effort. 50km-700km is 100 points, 700-1400km is 200 points, more than 1400km is 300 points
5. Bonus points up to 25 for miscellaneous at the discretion of the organiser.

A couple of changes to this year:
- A club also qualifies for calculation if it only entered one tournament, but it was a tournament it played in last year (ie it has a history of playing the tournament) - this is to recognise continuity from year to year. So for example, the Brisbane Barbarians, in their third year of playing Regionals, are in.
- We've done away with the 'Captains Voting' element we tried last year - it was too hard.
- If there are two divisions at the tournament, these are treated as two different tournaments. However, points in the lower division are awarded at 75%. So for example, QUTies will probably receive more points for their 3rd in Div 2 at AUGs than Griffith for its 12th in Div 1, but not a lot more.
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2009 Tournaments
The following tournaments are currently (hopefully) entering calculations - please let us know if we've missed ones you've played in: BCI, Northern Regionals, Nationals, Eastern Youths, Slamtown Invitational, Brisbane Indoor, Lovefest, AUGs, Mixed Nats and Big Sky 9s.

Qualifying Clubs
We think the following Clubs will be given points (based on the above). Please let us know if we've missed something: UQ Lovers, Mind the Gap, Lounge Lizards, Firestorm, Sultry, Delirium, Thor, Slamtown, Barbarians, Downstairs Mixup, Fresh Fries, Trevor, QUTies and Griffith Guerillas.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Didn't Dojo play Slamtown, and therefore qualify?

Anonymous said...

It'll be hard to go past UQ winning this again, after winning AUGs

Anonymous said...

No Byron this year?

Anonymous said...

You'll include Halibut results, won't you?

Stu Austin said...

Surely this is a one horse race, given that UQ have played AUG's, Lovesfest, Slamtown and Halibut?

Pete said...

Firestorm could be up there with 5th in Perth + long distance, regionals, and BC Invitational

Jules said...

Its very noticeable how the points system is largely participation-based. ie: youre better off playing a tournament and coming last than not playing at all.

This obviously gives a significant advantage to mixed teams because there are a lot more opportunities to play mixed tournaments than open/womens. Im sure theres been plenty of thought/debate go into the points system but maybe scores should be corrected for point-earning potential as well? Maybe work out a percentage of the actual score to the potential total score?

Otherwise its hard to see UQ losing it any year unless a great brisbane mixed team comes along again like Booty. Look at last year - UQ won it even though we failed to even attend AUGs.

Anonymous said...

perhaps putting in a system of mitigators to reduce the points earned by clubs who participate in alot more competitions


Will-i-aM

Pete said...

I think it's a good idea to have it at least slightly biased towards teams that participate more as an incentive to the teams to actually play the tournies. But Julz point of there being more mixed tournies than opens and womens is good. We could normalise the scores for each division to include the number of possible tournaments a team is able to play. That way it could be evened up for mixed/open/womens clubs.

JdR said...

Thanks for the comments. Yes, there is a strong bias towards participation, or perhaps more accurately, continuity. Because this is what having a club is about - playing with it as much as possible. And the award is about promoting club development.

All that said, we here at the Blog are willing to tweak things a little bit from year to year.

There is nothing to stop a single club from entering teams into mixed, open, women's, junior and master's divisions though. Think what a strong club that would be!

Jack said...

On Stu's post. Not to mention they also entered indoor champs!

Also fun fact for whoever is counting, Fresh Fries and Trevor is the same team, we just went through a name change and got some new jerseys.