Ty, Unfortunately you can't have a system that changes year-to-year to accommodate districts that are having a particularly strong or weak year.
The women's nationals allotment used to be based on the number of teams participating at the qualifying district championship. Going into the weekend, it was uncertain how many teams would qualify from a given district, and yes, it was definitely in the "bubble" teams' best interest to make sure that some of the weaker teams participated to increase the slots from their district. Not sure that those were 'slapped together teams'; they did regularly participate, but would not normally have competed in the districts. The women's nationals allotment now (as of two years ago) is calculated based upon the number of teams in a district that entered an all-women team in any regatta of 2 or more double-handed divisions in any of the previous four(4)seasons, with a limit of 6 teams per conference. The idea is to encourage and build women's sailing teams in each district. Rather than encourage teams to only participate in the district championship, they should be encouraged to sail in regularly scheduled regattas. Does it work? Sometimes. Do coaches spend time convincing weaker teams to send a women's team to a regularly scheduled regatta (so they count for the district)? Could happen, but probably the time is better spent figuring out how to improve your own team to get one of the allotted spots. Is it fair? Sometimes, sometimes not. By the way, without too much difficulty looking through regatta results I found 22 MAISA schools that had a women's team participate in a two-division regatta (out of the 24 regular and provisional teams used for the berth allocations). If there were two more teams in PCCSC that had women's teams participate in the past two years, then PCCSC would have gotten a 3rd berth this year. So as a district, it is in your interest to help promote and support women's sailing. Not sure if one method is better than another. This year, PCCSC had a particularly strong turnout at their women's district championship...9 of the 11 teams that counted in the berth allocation formula...and would have gained berths in the 'old' system of allocation. While UCSB was a relatively close 3rd overall, I'm not sure it is fair to characterize another qualifying team's performance as mediocre. If I knew my team was in a qualifying spot, I would worry about protecting that position rather than closing up the gap to make my qualifying more respectable. Perhaps it would be fairer to allocate one automatic berth per district, then select the remaining 11 teams looking at their performance that year similar to the NCAA college basketball tournament (no controversies there, right?). The only concern is that this might imbalance the allocations even more in favor of the "ACC teams" who have traditionally had more support for their women's programs and participate in more regattas over the course of a year. No perfect solutions, but rather than disparage the current system, let's think of some creative solutions to make the allocations more fair and at the same time increase the opportunities for and support of women's sailing. Brad Dellenbaugh ________________________________________________ icsa mailing list [email protected] http://www.collegesailing.org/mailman/?listname=icsa
