Evening BD & UU,
The academic year is now over, and that can only mean one thing... Over the last few years, I have put together data consolidating the past season’s competitions at UK University level*, across all formats of ultimate, to try and gauge the performances of our clubs from a perspective different to where teams finished at individual Nationals events, but by taking into account performances by second/third/fourth teams, across all of open, women’s and mixed. The aim, therefore, is to show the strength of our many university clubs through their depth and ability to field strong sides across all formats of the sport, and provide something of an unofficial ranking of UK Ultimate's university sides. Using a points system similar to that used at Tour, clubs were awarded a certain number of points dependent on their finishing position, and also the number of teams at a given tournament (coming 15th out of 24 is more impressive than out of 16). Where second/third/fourth teams were involved, these numbers were combined to give one overall club score. Nationals was given double the weighting of Regionals. Also, in instances where clubs entered in cohorts with other club(s), points were shared equally among those teams. As with previous years, I accept that this may, of course, be a flawed system, but given feedback received in past years, and requests for this year’s rankings, I felt it a worthwhile exercise. Particularly as the methodology has remained constant since 2011, we are able to see year on year trends for clubs. The most notable flaw with this method is the overall ranking of Irish teams; this is unavoidable given the minimal amount of tournaments our friends out west enter, and obviously, we can assume the national open Champions would rank far higher if they did. But for UK teams, that have the opportunity to enter any and all UK Ultimate University Competitions, I believe this to be an accurate reflection of overall strength. The points given were all totalled up, and weighted to give a co-efficient for each club; the top side gaining 1000.00, and lower ranked clubs given a proportional scoring. The outcome of which is below. *Incidentally, this, and previous year’s tables can be found in spreadsheet format, here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AjQYHCMrLMahdEYxNlB3bXp0eWo1dUc4UmxMZHVlX1E&output=html For those with just as much interest in tables and stats as me; you can also see how your (unofficial) university ultimate ranking pars up with your university’s official BUCS overall ranking... http://www.bucs.org.uk/bucscore/bucspoints.aspx Anyway, I hope this is of interest to both current and graduated ultimate players. As always, any thoughts gratefully received. Selected highlights: -Sussex are, once again, the strongest university club in the country. -Surrey are the ‘most improved’ university club in the UK, moving from 36th in 2012, to 13th in 2013. -Winchester & Hertfordshire are ‘best new entries’ to UK university ultimate coming in at 54th & 55th respectively. -KCL are the strongest club that did not qualify for a national tournament. -Plymouth, Strathclyde, Leeds Met, Glasgow and Sheffield have all seen substantial rises. -Southampton, Bristol, Exeter and Portsmouth drop out of the top 10. 1. Sussex (1000) 2. Edinburgh (762.0) 3. Dundee (696.8) 4. Birmingham (605.2) 5. Manchester (542.6) 6. Nottingham (525.9) 7. Bath (514.0) 8. Aberdeen (499.0) 9. Sheffield (492.7) 10. Loughborough (469.2) 11. Southampton (447.6) 12. St Andrews (434.1) 13. Surrey (427.2) 14. Durham (400.6) 15. Warwick (400.2) 16. Newcastle (396.8) 17. Leicester (384.2) 18. Plymouth (383.7) 19. Leeds (372.3) 20. Cambridge (3) 21. Cardiff (347.0) 22. Bangor (338.9) 23. Portsmouth (314.6) 24. Exeter (295.8) 25. Glasgow (279.9) 26. Bristol (277.8) 27. Oxford (270.8) 28. Strathclyde (264.1) 29. Kent (259.4) 30. Imperial (249.5) 31. UCL (233.1) 32. Stirling (227.9) 33. York (185.9) 34. Brighton (179.6) 35. Lancaster (176.0) 36. UEA (175.5) 37. Heriot-Watt (174.6) 38. Cork (168.1) 39. Swansea (141.4) 40. Liverpool (141.0) 41. KCL (135.1) 42. Sheffield Hallam (113.4) 43. Lincoln (101.5) 44. Leeds Met (80.5) 45. Oxford Brookes (77.5) 46. Bournemouth (70.2) 47. Holloway (67.1) 48. De Montfort (66.5) 49. Brunel (63.4) 50. Nottingham Trent (59.3) 51. Aberystwyth (55.8) 52. Chichester (52.7) 53. Hull (49.4) 54. Winchester (46.3) 55. Hertfordshire (44.9) 56. Essex (44.6) 57. Chester (42.7) 58. LSE (38.8) 59. UAL (38.6) 60. Limerick (35.6) 61. UCLan (35.2) 62. Staffordshire (28.5) 63. Cornwall (24.9) 64. Anglia Ruskin (24.7) 65. Keele (22.8) 66. Gloucestershire (13.0) 67. Aston (11.8) 68. Bradford (11.7) 69. Coventry (9.7) 70. Wolverhampton (7.1) 71. UWE (3.5) 72. City (1.9) Dave -- .................................................... Dave Halls __________________________________________________ BritDisc mailing list BritDisc@ranulf.net http://www.fysh.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/britdisc Staying informed - http://www.ukultimate.com/staying-informed
