Team Tournament Question

[steyr762khx]

How does one go about seeding a standard USFA team tournament? Do you go straight from Individual USFA rankings of team members (example: a team with 3 C ranked fencers is higher than one with 3 D ranked fencers) or is it more a random thing? Also, anybody in the GLS section interested in coming to a Team Tournament / Open at Miami University in late september?

[veeco]

You take the sum of the individual rankings (taking into account national points, letter ranking, year of letter ranking) of the best 3 fencers on the team, and that provides you with your team seeding.

[oiuyt]

Depends on the tournament.

For D1 Team events at nationals you take the ordinal placement of each of the team members from the D1 individual event that year (which is why the individual event always preceeds the team event by a day or two). Any fencer who didn't compete gets assigned a number value that is greater than the number of people in the D1 event (I forget what number is typically used). Total up the three best scores for a team (best == lowest). Seed the teams based on that total, lower is better.

Junior Team events at nationals are the same, but using the junior individual results.

Senior Team events use IA results, II results (plus an adjustment factor, which I THINK is either 20 or 60 places (and might change year-to-year), or III results (plus a larger adjustment factor (60 or 100 places?), whichever results in the best (lowest) score for that fencer. Again there is an assigned score for a fencer who didn't participate in any of IA, II, or III in that weapon (maybe 300?). Total the scores as above and seed the teams.

Other than that there aren't really rules. What I've most commonly seen in local competitions is to assign everyone a score based on their classification. U == 0, E == 1, up to A == 5. Total the scores for the fencers and you have a team score. Higher == better. This method disregards minor classifcation (the year), as well as national points (if any). But you can really make up any seeding you want. If it's something off the wall I suggest publicizing the method prior to the tournament, and in any case you should announce the method prior to the start of fencing. You could adjust the above to take minor classifcations into account. Multiply the above by 10 and then subtract 1 point for every year prior to the current year (so an A05 == 50 points, a D03 == 18, etc.). I haven't been to a competition (that I know of) that has bothered accounting for minor classifcations.

The other solution is a complete round-robin (poule unique), in which case seeding doesn't matter at all and everyone gets lots of fencing. :)

-B :)