The First Official Regular Season

The team registration deadline for the UPA College Series is this Friday.

There is one more weekend left to play in the first ever UPA Regular Season.

The UPA has released some information about the college restructuring plans for 2011 and beyond.

Seems to me like a good time to check in about the whole process of college restructuring...

The college restructuring process has been building ever since the UPA's strategic plan came out in early 2008 and the survey data, task force, and board proposals have all had big effects on the college division in the past two years. One of the biggest changes felt in 2010 has been the implementation of an official college regular season.

Based on membership survey data and the discussions of a representative task force, one of the priorities of the college restructure was to provide teams with a "meaningful" regular season. There are a number of ways that could have been accomplished, but in light of many of the other priorities also identified, we felt that offering the chance to earn strength wildcards for your section or region based on this season's play was a good solution.

The way the UPA regular season now works is that college teams that play in a minimum of 10 games at UPA sanctioned events before March 29th will have their records and standings count towards strength bids for Regionals and the College Championships. Importantly, teams that did not meet that 10 game requirement would still be able to play in the UPA Series, just like they could before.

This type of regular season incentive and structure builds upon the system already in place for years of teams choosing their own schedule at independent tournaments leading up to the College Series. Requiring that regular season games only count towards the official rankings when they are played at UPA sanctioned events ensures that eligibility can be checked (even if it is after the fact)--maintaining a crucial element to the college division. Over time it will also help standardize what participants, tournament directors, and field site owners can come to expect from ultimate tournaments.

Requiring a minimum number of games before a team's standings would count was necessary to ensure that the ranking system would be robust enough to create accurate rankings. Deciding what number to use as the minimum was debated at length among the members of the task force. 5 games was the absolute minimum for the algorithm to work with, but even that seemed a bit unreliable. We have all seen teams end up in the top of the rankings after 1 early tournament win, but by the end of the season (and with more data) the rankings are much more accurate. 10 games was chosen as a number that would be easily achievable in two weekend tournaments and also provide the algorithm with enough data to be reliable.

I had been particularly apprehensive of the 10 game minimum for regular season standings to count, mainly because many women's teams historically would not have met that threshold. In fact, less than half of all women's teams in the Score Reporter from the year before had played 10 games before Sectionals. However, the way the UPA regular season is devised, all of those teams that did not meet the threshold would still be eligible to play in the UPA Series--the status quo before the restructuring process began. The ability to have your sanctioned games count towards earning your section or region bids is a way to make sectional/regional bids more accurately reflect which teams are strong in the current season; teams that don't fulfill the 10 game threshold are then simply working within the system that was in place previously and are still able to advance through the Series.

Additionally, when restricting analysis to just the teams that would be affecting a section or region's chances to earn a strength bid, the vast majority of teams had met the 10 game minimum. The top 8 open teams and top 5 women's teams (determined by their algorithm power ratings) in each section will be compared to allocate 2 of the 4 strength bids to Regionals. The remaining two strength bids to Regionals are awarded to sections with the "next" highest ranked team beyond the bids that each section has already been allocated. The 4 strength bids from Regionals to the College Championships work the same way, except that both the open and women's divisions use the top 8 teams in each region for the 2 region strength bids. The decision was made to set the bar high enough to encourage participation in pre-Series events but not so high that teams would be incapable of meeting it. So far, teams have shown that this was a reasonable compromise. Only 4 of the top 50 ranked women's teams in the country will not have reached the 10 game threshold by the end of next weekend.

There was also much debate about how a meaningful regular season would affect teams in colder climates, even though teams and players from across the country had asked for a regular season. Again, we poured over the Score Reporter and other UPA databases to determine what teams' travel patterns were for tournaments. Teams from northern areas had already established traditions of traveling south for tournaments, especially over spring break. The algorithm program has a decay feature built in to more heavily weight later games in the spring. Additionally, the schools in colder regions like the Metro East and New England tend to be densely populated, allowing for the possibility of arranging match-play during practice time for teams needing to add an extra game or two to their schedules. We found that the teams that were most likely to be affected by strength wildcards were also the teams more likely to travel to warmer locations for tournaments.

Instituting a major change like the UPA did this year is often the cause for stress and uncertainty. I thought the UPA communicated with its members in a wide variety of ways about these coming changes, laying things out clearly in online documents. Teams have stepped up accordingly to the challenges of scheduling their games to include UPA sanctioned events. That said, there will definitely be lessons learned from this season as the UPA moves forward with its restructuring plans.

As mentioned in the UPA board minutes from January (page 8), the college restructuring plan for 2011 and beyond will build upon the regular season implemented this year. As the details for the further changes are announced, the task force will be carefully considering how the system worked this year. If you have questions or comments about this, please don't hesitate to let us know.

Thanks,

Gwen

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You can post a message to the entire Board by commenting here (comments will not be publicly viewable, but will be read by the Board), or feel free to send me an email about this or anything else at gwen.ambler@upa.org.