Dear sailors, coaches, umpires and organizers,
I have been spending some time recently thinking about some recent trends
in team racing regattas that I find flawed. Never being one to just go with
the flow, I thought that I would share them to spur critical thinking.
Recently, more and more major events(worlds, Hinman, Charles River Open
etc.) have been using a quarterfinals, semifinals, finals system with it
seems, most often, a best of three or best of five format in these
rounds. I have always understood it to be a fundamental tenet of sailing
competition that in order to select the most deserving champion as much
data as possible (race results) occurring over as many days as possible, in
all types of conditions should be used to determine the winner and define
the game. That is why we sail a series of races, results from all the days
in fleet racing are counted and the most important championships occur
over the most days and most races.(I think the current ideas for finals in
Olympic classes are wrong.) It seems to me that this is not what happens
with the current elimination brackets. You can sail many races against
many good teams all just to determine your seeding in a quarter
final. Then a series of best of threes sometimes determines the winner.
All those other races are just discarded as meaningless. Another concern I
have about the elimination format is that because less data is used, umpire
calls become a bigger factor. As someone who is pretty knowledgeable
about team racing and watches as many team races a year as anyone in the
world, I know how difficult making umpire calls is. I believe this is
mitigated by the fact that the bad calls even themselves out. I believe
this is true but only if enough races are used. In a best of three
elimination, umpire calls can have a huge effect on the outcome. One way
around these issues would be to make the elimination rounds longer, maybe a
minimum best of five and perhaps best of 7. This would require these
rounds to start much earlier in the regatta. I believe that they would
also need to occur over a few days. I think it is less than ideal for the
final result of a sailing competition to be decided on just the last
day. A team could be specialists in one condition and win the regatta
despite not being the best team throughout the tournament.
I guess my conclusions come down to two items.
Either start the elimination rounds earlier in the regatta to make them
longer and occur over more days or use a format similar to college sailing
where later round robins have more races against fewer and better
teams but all races against the same competition count. Some may object
to this latter format on the grounds that there is less drama than in an
elimination because the winner can be decided before the last race. I have
a potential partial solution to this. It goes something like this: a round
robin (or double)amongst the top eight, a double round robin amongst the
top four, a finals of four races(or three) amongst the top two. The team
with the best record of the finalists is the winner. There is a
possibility that a team could still clinch victory before the finals but it
seems extremely unlikely. If a team hasn't clinched before the finals, the
regatta would always end on a victory by one of the top two. Ties between
the two would be on a who beat whom more often basis so the format must
make them race an odd number of times.
Just some thoughts.
Thanks,
Bern Noack
Assistant Sailing Coach
Harvard University
Regatta Coach of Silver Panda-USA 2 at the Team Racing Worlds
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