Just a reminder that the Birmingham venue will host the top 32 teams for
Tour 2, meaning all those who played T1 in London (except the 5
non-returning European teams) and the top 13 teams from Bishop's Cleeve.
Other teams, and Women's, will be in Burton.
I don't imagine there will be drop-outs at that top level, but if any
team amongst that top 32 is not intending to attend T2, please get in
touch very very soon so that we can bump someone up.
Cheers,
Benji
UKU Director of Competitions wrote:
BD,
A note about tournament formats for this season, and an explanation.
Long-winded no doubt, but you should see the amount of discussion
that's gone into this.
The competitions committee are very much behind the idea of keeping a
separate identity for the A,B and C tour - it seems to us that most
people's imaginations have been caught by the divisional structure and
that most people refer to themselves as 'an A tour team' or 'a B tour
team' and so on. The divisions also allow simple schedules to be
written for at least the top 32.
However, for this year, there are some difficulties - of our own
making, I suppose, but we didn't see them coming. For Tour 1, we
expected 8 European teams, and took the obvious decision to extend T1
A to 24 teams. This will enable us to run perhaps the best Tour event
the UK has seen, but it has some knock-on effects.
We actually have 7 non-UK teams, but in fact 2 of them are intending
to play the whole tour, and thus are not really foreign teams at all
under the rules. In particular, they'd expect to hold their seed for
T2. So instead of the planned 16 UK and 8 Euro teams, we actually have
19 fully-fledged tour teams at T1 A. Thus, in order to have 3 promoted
from the B-tour for T2, we'd have to relegate 6 teams. That's clearly
too many.
Reducing the number promoted is also not appealing, since T1 is not
guaranteed to be well-seeded. And in order to have just our normal 3
relegated, we'd have to promote no-one at all.
The possibility of making A-tour 2 larger is unfair on the TD for the
C-tour 2 and Women's who would lose 4 teams' cash - significant money.
So we've taken the decision that Tour 2 (with A&B co-located) will be
a 32-team format with some crossing over possible around what would
normally be the A-tour and B-tour boundary. This will give all the
teams the chance to find their level. The top 8 will of course remain
peer-pooled - this is an issue around the 16/17 barrier, and we don't
want or need to change things for the top teams.
There is also a similar problem with B&C tour 1 - only 13 teams can
get into that top 32 for T2, and the same things apply to promotion
and relegation as above. To get 3 C-tour teams promoted, we have to
relegate 6. And that means those 6 miss out on playing with the top 32
at T2 and go to a different venue, which is a big thing.
So again, we have taken the decision to remove some boundaries from
Tour 1 B&C. There will be a top 8 (peer-pooled), a middle 16 in 4
pools of 4 (across the important 9-24 bracket that determines getting
into the top 32 for T2) and a bottom 12, followed by the chance to
crossover between these brackets.
Hopefully that all makes sense. And hopefully the big tournament with
all those non-UK teams will be so excellent that it's all worth it.
Cheers,
Benji
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Staying informed - http://www.ukultimate.com/staying-informed
