I have thought of similar approaches to Andy's in the past. Consider the team that goes through the weekend with good spirited games and gives an average spirit score that is higher than the tournament average. As the person collating the spirit scores how are you to know whether they are being too lenient or just played against the most spirited teams there? How do you chose the weight that you apply? Andy's method would effectively scale down spirit scores closer to the average - this wouldn't help us differentiate between teams as most of the time it would act to minimise differences between teams.
I like the idea of explaining why spirit was bad - although to some extent the BULA system does this already - if it is used properly and teams are given a breakdown for each of the 5 sections (and potentially the breakdown from each game). I wouldn't envy a TD having to write down explanations for each game for each team - far too many dimensions when you already have enough on your plate. And shouldn't this be something that gets discussed after the game anyway - either in the spirit circle or just between captains? The only way to get spirit scores to work is to educate teams how to use the spirit scorecards properly and have the entire team there to discuss the scores (otherwise you risk the person that was fouled every time they tried to pivot forcing the opposition's spirit down when the person who was congratulated for their amazing grabs didn't get the opportunity to get it back up). I have seen (and been on) far too many teams that go, "I think they were a 12", and made up the individual scores to get to this number. One way to avoid this is to meaningfully publish the average score received from each section. -2, -1, 0, +1, +2 is much easier for people to cope with and to standardise - there is no reason why you can't just add 10 to everyone's score at the end to make sure the final score is between 0 and 20. The issue then is our expectation of spirit and that varies hugely between teams and even between players within the same team. Something that could be made clearer on the scorecard maybe. Gary P.s. Sorry if you receive this twice - it claims to have bounced the first time. __________________________________________________ BritDisc mailing list [email protected] http://www.fysh.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/britdisc Staying informed - http://www.ukultimate.com/staying-informed
