Discussion: Announcing the 2009 Sprint Series

The Sprint Series that you know and love will be back for 2009, beginning Jan 1. The basic rules remain essentially the same but there are some changes for 2009, most notably in the scoring system.

Rules:

1. Rules may be added, changed, or deleted at any time by The Deciders.

2. All sprints from Jan. 1 to approx Sep 15, 2009 in North America count as qualifiers in the Sprint Series as long as they are announced in the Sprint Series schedule (by email to krisbeecroft@msn.com) at least 14 days in advance.

3. Results must be sent to The Deciders (cristina.luis@gmail.com) electronically within 24 hours of the event.

4. For all sprints the last place finisher (male or female) is awarded 10 points. An additional 2 points is awarded for each placing - the more people you beat (and bring to the meet), the more you score. Points are awarded to men and women together in one results list, ranking lists are kept separate.

5. Any sprint that is a fundraiser for the Senior or Junior Team, USA or Canada, gets a bonus 10 points. In addition, the US and Canadian Sprint Champs and Team Trials also get 10 bonus points. The bonus is applied to all sprinters.

6. Anyone making the A final at the WOC sprint in Hungary or finishing in the top half of the field at the JWOC sprint gets a bonus 50 points.

7. Your best 6 sprints count, plus any WOC/JWOC bonus points.

8. A bonus prize will be awarded to the sprinter(s) who attend(s) the most Team Fundraiser sprints.

Details for the Sprint Series Finals are still being worked out.

Note that the Commissioner has retired and, like the jersey number of so many great athletes before him, the title has also been retired. This year's series will be run by The Deciders, Kris Beecroft and Cristina Luis. Peter Gagarin remains the Commissioner, though we didn't tell him that.

Sprint fast and sprint often!

The Deciders
www.sprintseries.org

I like Rule 4. Very clever. Let's see how it works.

I think the whole thing is brilliant. Especially the next-to-last paragraph.

I agree. It is all brilliant.

So lemmie see if I get the scoring system. If I bring 50 first-time orienteers to a sprint and I win (51 total, assume no one else shows up), I get (10+50*2)=110, but if I bring 10 M21's and I finish second I get (10+9*2)=28. Is that correct?

This example seems to illustrate the brilliance quite nicely, Eddie. A scoring system that puts a premium on introducing new people to the sport!

And, just to point out, if your 50 first-time orienteers are all female, and if you still win, you still get 110 points. As I said, brilliant.

If the goal is increasing attendance, then thats fine. But if you really want to select the winner of a recruiting contest, why not just award points directly for the number of people you bring rather than mix in results that won't mean much? You're just adding noise to your signal.

While I see Eddies point that you could easily game the system by bringing a ton of newbies to a meet, I think the scoring system still has merit in that it is self adjusting to allow proportionally more points for the larger well attended meets and fewer points to the winner of a minor meet. Not that it would benefit someone like myself whose bigger points typically come from low key sprints ....

Gaming or not, there's no difference between finishing 1st and finishing 10th (or possibly 15th) in any given race. And the 10 point bonus for the Champs races is too small. That's just 5 places. Probably smaller than the average variation in race attendance. How many races would you have to win in order to just get past the attendance sigma? There's almost no incentive to win in this scoring system, so naming a winner at the end of the year won't mean much.

Score based on recruiting numbers and name the top recruiter instead. That will be better for the goal, if attendace is the goal.

If you want to make it complicated Eddie, come up with an interaction variable. Because I am fairly confident that a Championship race will have the greatest attendance anyway. The 50 first time orienteer thing looks like a red herring.

Yes, a champs has some tougher competition, but so what? Are you going to let those 5 21s finish ahead of you to negate the bonus? I doubt you will.

Anyway, it seems like winning is a strictly dominant strategy rather than coming in 10th, no? Isn't it 20 more points? And encouraging a bigger field is (weakly?) dominant as well?

Rule number 4 is designed to be simple and to reward the winners of larger events. It is well understood that more competitors does not always mean more competitive. However, if there is ever a case where people start bringing 50 newcomers to a sprint in order to gain lots of points, then we'll worry about a 'solution' to the 'problem'.

That's what we get when the free world (or SS) is run by Deciders. Whenever there is a 'problem,' they have 'solutions.'

Anyway, I do appreciate Eddie's concern about the bias inherent in the scoring system. He makes a good point. That said, I think the new version, while not perfect, is an improvement over the previous version. And, it is simple and understandable.

I have come to realize that the SS is not just about winning. (Not to get sappy or anything.) There are multiple things it can (and has) acommplish(ed) and this evolution is just a reflection of that.

All hail the Commissioner and his Deciders!

This new scoring system will reward the fastest sprinters. And if that is the goal for this year, great. But one probable consequence is that there will be fewer sprint races, especially by smaller clubs. A few years ago, I helped organize 6 sprints, knowing I would get 100 or 98 points as one of two females who participated in a small field. That was fun, introduced a few more people to sprints and my 600 points did not interfere with the overall standings. Now, I have absolutely no desire to host an event where I will get only 20 points or so.
Edit: Cristina, thanks for the reminder on the points. You're right of course. The most I could earn in the past was 45 points for a fund-raising sprint. Memory fades fast, I guess....

That's certainly something to pay attention to and I knowI don't want to discourage clubs from hosting sprints.

Under last year's scoring system the most points you could get for a local (non-fundraiser) sprint was 30. You couldn't get any more points than that even if you beat 15 - or 20 or 50 -people. Under this year's scoring system you could 30 points by beating 10 people (of any age or gender), or by making it a fundraiser and beating 5 people. That seems pretty reasonable. But The Deciders are certainly open to suggestions (see rule #1).

I have no idea if this system will be any better than previous systems, but I think it's worth a shot.

Sure, I could earn 30 points by beating 10 people. But I could earn 100 points by waiting a week and placing 10th at a different event, so why bother with the smaller one? I earn 3 times the points for a worse result.

Instead of awarding the 10 point bonus to the big, "important" races (which will be heavily attended anyways because they are champs), why not put that incentive on the smaller local races to sweeten the deal? Offer a 20-point bonus to PTOCs first sprint of the season. Pick a few random ones on the east and west coasts too.

This is kind of like the (anticipated) deflation argument. Why make a large purchase today when you expect it can be had cheaper tomorrow? It is like a vicious cycle.

This argument is similar and is predicated on (probably reasonable) ex ante foresight. You know there are two events coming up and you know one will be more popular.

If you have less than 5 events, it seems clear that you would want to attend both as they both contribute to your score. If you already have 6, it is a different issue. Then, assuming you want to improve your score, you will only go to events that will contribute more points than your average.

Bear in mind that this is exactly the same situation as with the current scheme. Under that system, if you have filled your schedule with Champs, TT, etc., winning a local 30 pointer is not worth your time. Therefore, you shouldn't go. But, under the old system, there would be no way to "redeem" that local sprint.

But, there are other reasons to go to events, aren't there? I really hadn't realized that people really thought this way--that I won't bother going to this sprint because I can get more points at the next one. I always assumed that there was always benefit to just going out and racing.

If enough people feel this way, the game theoretic analysis is trickier. You have to do some sort of recursive reasoning to determine if the schedule will devolve into extremes. No one at some events and everyone at others.

The great thing about this new system is it rewards winning and it rewards recruiting in the same simple scheme, without the need for exclusions, riders, or ad hoc things.

But you're assuming there are no costs to attending an event. Your assumption is there are only benefits. The fact is I have limited time and limited money to travel, so I have to choose certain events. I will pick the events that have the best value for my money and time.

In the "old" scheme, there was effectively a points cap for all events. No event was egregiously more valuable than any other. All local races had the same 30-point value. Races that were likely to draw stronger competition (an thus harder to win) were given an appropriately higher value. That is no longer the case in the new system. Even the USOF rankings have a "gnarlieness" feedback system, so the score is at least related to some real measure of your competiton's strength.

With this system the number of points you score in any event has a large randomness to it. Reducing the randomness in any measurement will increase the believability of the result. We are knowingly and willfully adding randomness here.

I wonder about the intended or unintended incentive for A meet sprint organisers to consolidate all the classes into as few courses as possible. Of course, a fair bit of this happens regardless but otherwise, I wonder whether, for instance, juniors will run their age class rather than M/F-21 in sprints because there will be more points available that way.

Which, on reflection, might shake up the sprint series points race, since I presume most juniors will run their age class at championship events.

jtorrance raises an issue that I wonder about, too. What happens at events where there are multiple courses? Is each course scored separately? Organizers who want their sprint to be worth more will offer only one course, thereby catering less to different skill levels. But wanting to include all comers, the course setter might make the course a bit easier.

Will we see more one-course sprint events? Will we see more easy sprint courses? Neither of these things would necessarily be bad, in my opinion, but they would be different than what we have had. Thus, if there is one thing the incentives in the new system do, it is to turn away from treating sprints like every other orienteering discipline format and create a different racing experience.

I should also say that what eddie writes has crossed my mind (and, I imagine, the minds of the Deciders) and I've decided that--while it may end up producing an inferior ranking system--the new system may also have beneficial side effects and is worth a try. If we see that it's lame after one season (or that it's tragically lame after a few months), then it can always be changed later.

My first thought was that the new system will take away the big points I used to get for decent placings at races in British Columbia with small fields composed largely of Canadian Team members. But I have already moved past that and am plotting to game the system and score a few hundred points per sprint race at local meets later this winter. Everyone else is welcome to do the same, of course, and wouldn't that be a good thing? If you happen to attend the events of a large club, you'll be at an advantage, but wasn't that already true?

It's going to be interesting to see how many JROTC kids from Texas or Georgia have over 1000 series points by April.

I see what eddie is saying, but I think you are also saying different things. Of course, there is also (constrained) randomness in the old system. Controlling for personal results, you could count on getting from 0 (I think?) to 30 points at a local event, entirely depending on who shows up, with the perverse incentive that you want no one to show up.

If we are attacking the proposed system for injecting randomness, it kind of argues against the ability to game it, no? I'm being semantic here, but I think "randomness" is the wrong term here. Or maybe not, I don't know.

I am saying if you can anticipate what events to go to in advance, then is "randomness" a problem?

You're right that I ignored the costs of attending an event. But, if costs are an issue, isn't the upside bias in this congruent with that? You anticipate which events will draw more and pay to go to those. The bigger, the bigger bang for the buck. I would think that the cost argument would argue for those. I guess the flipside is it argues against the smaller meets.

But, the principal difference with the new scheme is that you are only guaranteed 10 points for showing up (as opposed to ? in the current system.)

In any case, you would not be able to finish at the top of the standings in the new scheme or old by just showing up to local events. You have to go to big sprints. And now you have to win.

I just love to orienteer and rankings and places are far secondary: something to enjoy or regret after the race. I like the current proposal on SS rules and hope we all have a great sprint season in 2009. All respect to Deciders for taking charge.

If one wants a ranking that accurately reflects sprint speed, one could plug the results of each race into an Attackpoint (or USOF) style ranking formula, and then total (not average) the scores from the best six races. It wouldn't be any more work for anyone. I think that the larger competitions around A-meets would serve as sufficient calibration between scores from different parts of the country, at least by the end of the season. This method ignores what place one finishes in; but that seems right since most (all?) the sprints have staggered starts, and are not head-to-head competition.

But I suppose there's something to be said for the quirkiness of the point systems, old or new, which provide opportunities for clubs and individuals to game the system. And then there are the bonuses, and the incentive to do team fundraisers, and ...

I'm with Greg on this. I didn't realize folks were so hopped up on points. I thought we were going to these things because the sprints are fun. Of course I don't get all that many points anyway:) Right on to the Deciders!

Why do discussions of ranking systems always end with a couple of "who cares about points" posts?

Sure, why bother with points at all? Don't even keep track of people's times for that matter. Why don't we just roll dice now to name the best sprinters in the country - no need to wait until the end of the season.

Some of us (maybe I'm the only one?) actually enjoy striving to be the best at the things we work hard at in life. After making lots of effort to train for, travel to and compete in a series of races, it would be nice to have a scoring system that accurately reflects those results rather than one that flips a coin to select the winners.

Bad scoring systems leave me disenfranchised. For the past couple of seasons I've had no incentive to go specifically to Sprint Series events - to even make the minimum number of races - because the scoring has seemed meaningless to me. Actually the scoring itself hasn't been so bad, its the mass start finals after a year of individual races that's seems goofy. I still go to sprints when I can because obviously the best training for sprints is running sprints, and they're fun. But I'm not going out of my way to attend or even host SS events specifically. I'll go to events that support the team if I can, and the two most important sprints of the year (US Champs, and the Team Trials sprint), and if I'm lucky, the WOC sprint and if I'm feeling rich, a WC sprint or two.

So if the new scoring scheme will encourage more folks to run SS events, then fine. That remains to be seen. It would be nice to use a metric that can actually measure the desired quantity for a change. The new scoring system is not an incentive to me personally.

Would it help to spread out, say, the top 5 finishers? Make the increment 10 points for them? Then winning a 20-person event is worth 88 points instead of 48, and placing 5th in a 50-person event is worth 108 points instead of 100. That would preserve the idea that winning is worth a lot (which Eddie values) while keeping the idea that everybody can get on the board (which appeals to me). The top people will still be those who win the big events but those people in the second tier have more opportunities to try to move up by attending smaller events.

This wouldn't be much harder to calculate and seems in the spirit of what the Deciders intended.

Eddie, pick your battles, this is not an important one :), I agree, people who live in areas with high density of orienteers will have an advantage, but does it realy matter; in the course of the year we will get to A-meets and under current proposal those are going to be the high scoring events, and they really will be the score makers. Do well at A-meet sprints and the rest does not matter.

Quality control is not an important battle?

Alternatives that reflect both goals? I will try one.

1st place points based on "N number of finishers" with limited (3 to 5 perhaps?) categories. The points in the following example are very pliable.

'Small event: N less than ___ : ' 1st place - 20 points

'Middle event(s): N between ___ and ___: 1st place - 25 or 30 or 35 .. points

'Large event: N more than____: 1st place - 50 points.

Then you'd have to (again) 'count from the top', each place dropping 1 or 2 points down to the minimum (10?) for everyone else. I support the minimum concept. If the scale needs more wiggle room just magnify it at all levels. (a 10 million point sprint?) Of course, proportionate bonuses as usual for important events.

1. N still matters - recruitment rewarded.
2. Bonuses for large attendance are capped. A local meet can't dwarf a major meet.
3. I prefer "This is/was a 40 point sprint." versus "I won a 57 point sprint.")
4. Keep it simple(r) and clear by keeping # of categories small and use same point structure in (-2?) each category.

Hey, y'know what, pardners? The dealer picks the rules for the hand. If the Deciders say one-eye jacks are wild, then they're wild, and if you don't like it, sit out the hand, The Sprint Series ain't the only game in town, and you don't even have to be a participant in the series to run in any partic'lar race. Quit whinin'.

Yer doin' jest fine, Deciders. The only suggestion I'd make is to score it more like pinball and give out 20,000 points per place instead of just 2.

To really have a recruitment bonus, you should only get points for beating the people you bring yourself. No poaching!

I would agree with Eddie that the new scoring system is a big departure from the conservative (more orienteering objective) system we had last year. I also think the new system does not cater to the competitive and semi- competitive orienteer who is spending time and effort into the sport with the expectations of a return on his investment, namely in the form of results and recognition from the rankings by himself, other orienteers and friends and family.

Some say, still the top people will be at the top of the rankings with the new system, but then why introduce strong external factor to the rankings (so strong in fact that it could possibly overpower the race results themselves. Eg: team trials sprint race not part of a big A meet, local meet with more participants than the US Sprint champs.

Marrying the objective performance measurement of running a race for x minutes with the geographic location of the meet, or the circumstances of its organisation, and size is just reducing the objectivity of that race result.

We should get other means and channels for promoting the events not at the expense of an objective scoring system. Here in Seattle the HS winter league is a great example. And the argument 'it will be good to promote the sport' again should not be used as an excuse to compromise between objective results and promoting events.

As for the Why do discussions of ranking systems always end with a couple of "who cares about points" posts?:
All rankings, results, classifications, stats etc... cater for some part of the members of each sport's community. Look at any mainstream endurance sport: running, cycling, triathlon. Yes, there are people doing these sports for fun, but I argue most of the people signing up at Boston marathon, or the local sprint triathlon of 5K event are competitive. But because of the deep fields the competitivenes is targeted towards results times, personal best, or just completion. Our sport is small enough that big percentage of competitors can look at rankings, results and placements that mean somehing (I am 15, I can train harder and aim at top 10) not like ( I placed 3456 th on my last marathon, I think I can improve with couple of 100 places :) ) So the competitivenes is targeted towards can I beat my PB, or last years time.

And the people that do it not for the results but for the fun or any other reason, can just ignore the rankings system, so these results and rankings don't need to cater to the recreational/"I do it for fun types" runners at all. "If you want people to take you seriously, first you need to take yourself seriously!"

Sure, as Billy says: if you don't like it don't buy it. And if Cristina's post was intended as an informational piece only, then that's what we are left with: vote with our attendance next season.

Personally with the new system I might have a much higher placement than last year (most of our local meets attract 60 - 70 people in the most advanced courses - larger fields than the US Sprint champs and the Team trials WRE meet.

The Sprint Series, it seems to me, originated as a grassroots effort to get more orienteers into sprint orienteering, more non-orienteers into orienteering, and more fun into everyone.

Events were easy to organize and publicize (just tell 'em a few weeks in advance, and you're good to go). Because of the lack of sanctioning and oversight (just let the clubs do what they want and send in the results), the Sprint Series is uncomplicated and fun. K.I.S.S. orienteering, if you will.

I don't fault them for trying something new, and I don't think that we're going to see less orienteers participate because of it. In fact, there's a better chance that we'll get more orienteers because of it.

That said, there are some good points to be made about the big clubs vs. small clubs. Previously, the scoring benefited the small clubs. Since the scoring counted from the top down, that's more average points per person. A solitary, one-legged, orienteer in North Dakota could have gamed the system by organizing a ton of sprints, and winning every one of them.

The proposed scoring system benefits the larger clubs with access to more people. Because this scoring system counts from the bottom up, Orienteers can game the system here, too. All you need are more people. I'd hold a campus sprint on the afternoon of a football game. Offer free entry (and beer) and bam, 140,000 points for the winner.

Small clubs like it when you count from the top down.
Large clubs like it when you count from the bottom up.

Here's a simple alternative: count both up and down from the middle. Whoever finishes in the middle of the pack at any standard race gets, say, 100 points. If you finish one place ahead of that person, you get 101 points. One place behind, you get 99. The average score will always be 100 points for any race.

This isn't a perfect solution, but it's simple, and it doesn't penalize the small events as much, and it still puts a desire to recruit more people to events.

(Does this discussion remind anyone of US History class?)

Small clubs like it when you count from the top down.
Large clubs like it when you count from the bottom up
The difference here is that counting from the bottom up has unlimited risk for gaming the system. With the last year system all that a small club's person can do is get 6 - 30 point results - barely enough to get into the top 20. And the top scorers could not benefit from 'gaming the system'.

With the new rules a person could end up in one of the top spots, by gaming the system.

And I agree with you that if the mission statement of the SS is to promote orienteering and bring more non-orienteers into orienteering then our discussion is not very relevant.

kupackman gave me some ideas - anybody want to partner up and put on 2 free 0.3 km sprints at some huge festival in a park? we can each enter the other's and get all those points. if this be the system, let's exploit to the extreme.

I had assumed that the talk of gaming the system was just because people were bored or because orienteers like to argue arcane and pointless things. I am beginning to be afraid that people actually think this is a risk. That seems bizarre to me. Who is going to game the system to try to win the "Sprint Series"? This seems patently ridiculous. Not only does the prize seem so dubious (all apologies) but given that the orienteering community is still rather close knit, who would want to besmirch their reputation to do so?

How many runners were there last year, or in previous years from the WIOL or Texas? I see that there were some people with points in NTOA, but not many. I guess the fear is that they will suddenly emerge now that we have a gameable system.

And I hope they do. If there are kids out there that can routinely beat 100 of their peers, they ought to enjoy a chance to put us old people around here in our place. They might well be able to. If this "gameable system" finally rouses these alleged sleeping giants, great.

Or, if we don't like it, we could always cap the score you can get in any race (like at 100) except for races that we are inclined to go to like the TT and the US champs and keep the upstarts out of our club a little longer.

"local meet with more participants than the US Sprint champs" So what? If you win the US Sprint champs you are still the US Sprint Champion. OK, you might not win the Sprint Series but does that really matter?

If people find enjoyment in gaming the system, then who is to begrudge that joy? Remember, as was so elegantly put, it is only the sprint series. Several people have already professed a lack of confidence in the system anyway.

Once you base something on the collective restraint, judgement, and common sense of a disparate population, it usually tends to a state of failure anyway. Gaming it just gets it there faster, makes it more robust in the end, and constructively removes any delusion of confidence some may have held in the non-apparant (to them) dysfunctional system.

Quality control is not an important battle?

Experience indicates, sadly, that it is not.

(Again, all my comments intended abstractly and not a judgement of this proposed system, which I have not even read the details of).

I'm neither competitive nor semi-competitive but I sure wish I was. I love sprint-Os AND I want the points. I finished too many sprints last year where I came away with zero points. From the back of the pack, I vote for The Deciders and the new system...for now.

PS Please link the Commissioner's helpful hints to create sprint courses to the sprintseries.org site so that we don't end up with 0.3k courses on the schedule.

Alternatives that reflect both goals?

Okay, here's an alternative that might satisfy both camps. Perhaps keep two sets of standings - one with the old scoring system and the other with the new one. How hard can that be ;-)

It would be a little like European pro soccer - where the challenge is to win "The Double". Or in this case, "The Triple" - which includes both Sprint Series standings and the Sprint series final. Oh, and also you could try to add the US and Canadian champs too. And in 2010 you could even go for SIX - adding the NAOC champs too!

truthfully, I was not meaning to really put on those 2 0.3 km sprints. The idea of "gaming it" I was giving was pointedly meant to be absurd - I would feel it'd be a waste of time to go through all that trouble!!

I will say though, 0.3 km is not a bad length for a sprint, if it's part of a package. I designed one for our 4-round club sprint championships in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. Then I went out on the map in the area of the 0.3 km sprint ... and there was so much wrong with the map there. Had to ditch that course.

Ended up with these lengths for the 4 courses: 1.7, 0.6, 0.7, and 1.7

Participants enjoyed the shorter courses a lot!

RouteGadget with the course maps:

http://baoc.org/gadget/cgi/reitti.cgi?act=map&id=1...

I am thoroughly sorry for putting on a three-category, A-meet-sanctioned Sprint at the Pig. Sorry to those of you who are seeking megapoints, that is. Mike made me do it.

With the scoring promising to be um somewhat correlated to the field's strength, I feel that the seeding prologue at the Sprint Finals, planned for Friday afternoon, November 13, at Point Bonita (Marin Headlands, Sausalito, California), will be quite important to form proper Finals brackets.

I recently attempted to update the standings and found that I had very few results submissions. If you were involved in organizing any of the Sprint Series events in April or May and would like to see your results incorporated then please submit results as outlined on the SS site:

How to submit results.

And I'll get out the standings that everyone wants to see!

I like the new look of the site!

> Why do discussions of ranking systems always end with a couple of "who cares about points" posts?

For those who care about time dependent running points, you can go to http://leshij.org/O-web/ and and navigate to my trial project of year rolling Men Sprint Standing here or
Women Sprint Standing here

Results in the above links are restricted to A-meet sprints only as I have no data from local clubs except BAOC and GCO.
I would be glad to include other local results if there is interest.