I think that IndoorDOC raises another flaw with the BULA system - it's too rigid. Sometimes one particular issue can ruin a game - for example a player who always reacts to a call against him by shouting "That's a bad call" then refuses to discuss what has happened. This can create a terrible atmosphere, but if we follow the BULA system and they have done everything else right they could still end up getting a high score overall. What if they are actually cheating by always calling travelling? Some of those less burly than IndoorDOC may want to give them a really bad spirit vote rather than a sound hiding!
And regarding an earlier email, Yes, it is too complicated for the tour. It might be great for other events, where there's more time between games, but not the Tour. 1) It's too complicated for teams/captains*: You have to award each team a score of 0-2 on 8 categories: Respect, Fair-Mindedness, Positive Attitude, Emotional Management, Avoiding Body Contact, Avoiding Violations and Fouls, Knowledge of the Rules, Their Spirit compared to ours. See http://www.beachultimate.org/blog/2008/05/sotg.html for the whole system. 2) It's too complicated for TD's**: In the Open tour we have four divisions, all (in theory) handing in their spirit score sheets within minutes of having to announce a spirit winner. With a nice easy number like 5 or 10 it's just about possible to calculate an average and find yourself a winner. With a number like 16 it suddenly becomes a lot harder. OK, so in an ideal world, every team would have a meeting after every game and discuss each category and come up with a fair score for each opponent. They would then hand their score sheet in to the TD's after their penultimate game and their final score after their last game and everything would be fine. Unfortunately, this just doesn't happen. I agree, it would be better if it did, but it doesn't. *In the Tour there isn't always much time between games. It slips people's minds at the beginning of the tournament. It's almost always left to a few people rather than the whole team, and generally they have enough trouble remembering who they actually played - let alone how well the other team knew the rules! **As a TD, I spend the time running up to and during the final wandering around trying to find teams who haven't voted yet - usually this is about 50% of the teams. Many of them have lost their score sheets. As for "having a pencil handy" - no chance. There's always a few who have gone home already. And who can blame them? We all know that complete fatigue at the end of Sunday, especially if you have had to captain a team as well. All you want to do is go home. Before somebody mentions the 'text your results at the end of each game' idea - I spoke to the T1 TD's about this, as it seems like a great solution, but in practice it doesn't work. 50 teams, playing 6 games each means 600 texts. Again,only about 50% of the teams get around to doing it, and many of them forget to add vital information, usually the name of the team they are playing or their own team. The result was even less thorough than usual, and a lot more work for everybody involved. As you can see, for the BULA system to work there would need to be a complete change in attitude across the whole Ultimate community. In my experience this is rather harder than herding cats, and ultimately it would lead to a more stifling and regimented system that wouldn't necessarily be fairer. Jack On 16 Jul 2008, at 17:04, IndoorsDOC wrote: > Patrick wrote: >>> in the BULA scoring system, it is also >>> apparently spirited to "Avoid frequently calling non-obvious >>> travels and >>> picks" - but what if it isn't obvious and so needs to be called! >>> isn't that >>> why we sometimes make calls - because they are NOT obvious! >>> >> >> Please read don't ignore the word "frequently". Frequently is not >> "sometimes". Have you never played a team that the moment you throw >> they >> call "travel" even though they are marking you hard and have no way >> to >> really know if you did or not. And they do that almost every throw? >> Spirited? No. The wording was carefully chosen. (disclosure: I was >> the >> driving force behind the new BULA/WFDF SOTG scoring system and we >> worked on >> it for more than a year, analyzing responses from the previous BULA >> system >> as well as analyzing SOTG discussions on BritDisc, ED, and >> rec.sport.disc, >> etc...) >> > Sorry, Patrick, I don't agree. If someone is calling travel calls when > my foot hasn't moved, or every time I throw, then they're cheating and > I'll stop the game to thrash them within an inch of their lives (or > something like that). But that's a long way from 'non-obvious'. The > wording may have been carefully chosen, but it's still wrong. > > If someone is deliberately calling crap travels, that's a far more > serious issue than just losing one point on their spirit score. > Whereas > if they're just calling a lot of travels when my foot (in my opinion) > has only moved a little, then that's a different thing entirely. If my > foot moves, they can call travel. If they're doing it too much, I > should > stop moving my damned foot. :-) > > It's either too serious an issue to be dealt with in this way, or it's > an issue about how much movement of my pivot foot constitutes a travel > that affects the game, and hence has to be settled between the players > involved by a discussion. Either way it shouldn't be in these spirit > rules. If it happens 'frequently' that I think it didn't affect the > game > but my marker did, then BOTH teams have failed to reach an agreement > on > what a travel ought to be. > > Spirit is an ideal that we cannot usually live up to in practice. The > word 'frequently' implies that we're allowed to make one or two crap > travel calls in a game, and thus undermines the 'ideal' nature of > spirit. I really, really, really don't like that wording. > > (The same argument applies to picks equally - if I lose 20 centimetres > on my guy because someone runs across me, then that could make all the > difference. It doesn't have to be an 'obvious' pick to affect play. > What's important in spirit is that I call it only if it affects play > [or > that I decline it if it doesn't affect play] - non-obviousness is > utterly irrelevant. Incidentally, picks are always pretty non- > obvious to > the cutter, because they happen behind him...) > > I'd be much more worried, in the spirit rules, about people's / > reaction/ > to pick and travel calls on big points. If it's a valid call, a > spirited > team shouldn't lose their rag. And like I said before, if it's /not/ a > valid call, it's a vastly more serious issue than losing one point > on a > 16 point spirit scale... > > On the other hand, having said all that, I think the BULA spirit > system > is pretty good, so don't take it personally. I just don't like that > one > line. > > B > __________________________________________________ > BritDisc mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.fysh.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/britdisc > Staying informed - http://www.ukultimate.com/staying-informed __________________________________________________ BritDisc mailing list [email protected] http://www.fysh.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/britdisc Staying informed - http://www.ukultimate.com/staying-informed
