In instituting a college regular season this year, one of the priorities of the restructuring task force was ensuring that all games with impacts on bid allocations would only be played between teams of college-eligible players. Before this season, the UPA Series were the only tournaments at which a team could be sure its opponents were all college eligible. The UPA guaranteed this by getting school registrars to sign off on each team's roster during spring term before Sectionals. It seemed unreasonable to require that teams follow such a detailed registration process before the regular season began in January, especially as the process would have to be repeated before the Series in March for schools on the quarter system or who recruited new players during the winter. Promoting growth in the college division is a priority of the UPA, so not erecting overly burdensome hurdles is a must--particularly not in the first year that a new system is put in place.
A balance was struck this year by requiring that all UPA college regular season games be played at UPA sanctioned events where rosters were submitted ahead of time. These online rosters could then (a) be distributed to the tournament participants so teams could verify opposing teams were only playing with players listed on their roster and (b) be compared by the UPA against the official registrar-approved roster submitted before Sectionals. If a team's roster from a regular season tournament couldn't be verified in both of these ways, the UPA could not guarantee that was a completely college-eligible team playing and so any of that team's results from that tournament would not count in the official ranking. A team would thus not be able to play at regular season events with ineligible ringers in an attempt to unfairly boost their rankings and help their section or region get an extra strength wildcard.
This year, some teams had the results from certain games not count because of these requirements for double-checking early roster submissions, sometimes due to missing administrative deadlines rather than because of ineligible participation. As I mentioned in a board blog post last year, the need for administrative deadlines is clear. Additionally, having a few games thrown out that were probably legitimate is worth the ability to guarantee that all games that remained in the rankings were played by eligible teams.
Speaking of deadlines, the team registration deadline (which only requires a minimum of 7 registrar-verified players on the roster) was March 26th. For teams playing Sectionals this coming weekend, the finalized roster deadline was last Friday. Since those dates, the UPA headquarters has had to compare over 12,000 players on over 700 registrar-certified rosters with the numerous online rosters submitted during the course of the regular season. Teams with discrepancies between their online rosters and registrar-certified rosters were contacted in the hopes they could be fixed. All of this had to be done before the final regular season rankings could be released to determine strength wildcards to Regionals and the College Championships. After the first release of the rankings, an error was found in the open division and the algorithm was rerun to ensure the final bid allocations would be accurate.
Because of the UPA's rigorous standards and roster checking, each of a region's 4 strength bids to Regionals and the nation's 4 strength bids to the College Championships were awarded based on play between fully college-eligible teams. That is a huge accomplishment and a great step forward for the sport. It is also a huge undertaking for the UPA staff and has meant that certain details about Sectionals (such as the exact format at number of bids) could only be announced during the week leading up to the events.
Now that the numbers are in, it also looks like college teams were able to successful navigate the new regular season requirements. 122 out of 186 women's teams (over 65%) who played in any UPA sanctioned event this season played at least 10 games and were included in the official regular season rankings. Over 55% of open teams did the same. There were still hundreds of teams who signed up for the UPA Series without participating in the regular season at all, but allowing for that was how the season structure was designed and seems appropriate for a growing college sport played under club status.
The issue of what should make a player eligible to play in the college division (and the youth division for that matter) has been discussed at length at the UPA board meetings I've attended. I'll save that topic for another post for next week, but in the meantime please feel free to let me know if you have any particular questions or comments.
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.
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