USACFC Review

[DJ Apostrophe]

okay... thanks for the info...

and the individiual competition format is just pools to straight DE?

thanks,

-w

[seak]

Originally Posted by DJ Apostrophe

okay... thanks for the info...

and the individiual competition format is just pools to straight DE?

thanks,

-w

2 rounds of pools into a DE, but not everyone qualifies for DE's. Two years ago it was top 16 only this year I believe it was 80%? I don't remember exactly

[oiuyt]

Originally Posted by Wafath

It was formed with some intention of being regionals for USACFC, if we go that direction.

Presumably it was formed with the primary intention of adding additional competitive opportunities for the participating clubs, no?

This helps bring up several of the issues with any of the ideas floated of using conferences as qualifiers for USACFCs.
* The conferences do not cover all eligible institutions in their area.
* The areas covered by various conferences overlap
* The membership of the various conferences overlap -- UVA, VTech, and W&M are all members of MACFA (which also gets frequently listed in this context) as well as SAC, Florida, VTech, and Maryland are members of NIWFA as well as SAC, a number of SAC-member schools are also in BWCFC, etc.
* Who controls conference creation/membership? This is a HUGE loophole for anyone looking to ease a qualification path
* The membership and participation requirements/restrictions of the conferences FREQUENTLY don't match those of the USACFC

Piggybacking on existing conferences looks to be very difficult. Spawning of new conferences might be even harder -- and certainly suffers from at least as many issues as the creation of a specific qualifier event.

-B

[MyrddinsPrecint]

Originally Posted by MyraTrue

On the other hand, I know that by this time in the semester, most of us are hurting in the academic arena. I agree with Bruce Capin that if this matters enough to you to go, you'll find a way. But spring semester is a run of almost every single weekend leading up to Nationals being an away tournament, or a two-day home event, and a lot of our students are hurting enough that paying money to go and miss 2 days of classes and a weekend... well, they don't want to.

You reschedule events, so that in the spring semester you have fewer tournaments. If nationals is preceded by two weeks of no touraments, or one optional tournament, or even a meet at home, it's a lot easier to get people to go to nationals.

[seak]

For Maryland nationals are right in the middle of midterms. If a kid has a midterm they can't reschedule, they can want to go and still not be able to actually attend.

There are also changes being proposed to SAC and there are several teams that are in conferences like BWCFC who are not in SAC. SAC also has a very large geographic area. However, it's a very fun tournament and its nice to fence those schools who are not BWCFC or NIWFA.

It will be intersting to see what directions things go in over the next year or so

[noodle]

Originally Posted by oiuyt

The conference has existed for two seasons and has always been run as individual competitions with results combined to name squad/team champions. Field sizes ranged from 18 (WS) to 36 (MF). I'm not clear how many fencers a school is limited to entering in a given event (if there is a limit). Top 3 results count towards squad/team totals.

we limited ourselves to 3, though i think the most is 5.
the provision, however, is that you must choose beforehand which 3 count for points.

[Wafath]

Originally Posted by oiuyt

Presumably it was formed with the primary intention of adding additional competitive opportunities for the participating clubs, no?

...

It was formed because it seemed like a good idea at the time. And yes, that is probably the primary reason why it seemed like a good idea. I provided that comment for historical prespective. If I remember correctly, we felt it was easier to build the tournament first and then morph it into a regional than waiting until regionals were required. It was also thought it would serve as a gateway for other schools to get interested in USACFC.

Should USACFC go in the direction of regional qualifiers, all of your points are valid, and will be seriously debated.

Another point of contention will be allotment of spots. Clearly some conferences will be stronger and/or larger than others, and deserve more qualifiying positions. Lets say that both BWCFC and NECCFL were both chosen as regional organizeations. Clearly based on membership and USACFC, NECCFL is the stronger of the two, so how many more spots does it deserve over the BWCFC?

W

[oiuyt]

Originally Posted by Wafath

Another point of contention will be allotment of spots. Clearly some conferences will be stronger and/or larger than others, and deserve more qualifiying positions. Lets say that both BWCFC and NECCFL were both chosen as regional organizeations. Clearly based on membership and USACFC, NECCFL is the stronger of the two, so how many more spots does it deserve over the BWCFC?

To my knowledge NECCFL hasn't had an event over the past three seasons (it MIGHT just be the past 2). Makes it harder to use as a qualifying conference. The NE conferences generally cited are NEIFC/NEWIFA (men's/women's equivalents to each other) or NFC (similar but slightly different membership). They have noticibly different restrictions on who is allowed to fence than the USACFC does. They both consist about 50% of NCAA varsity programs (may or may not be a problem, depending on how things are structured and is similarly true of other conferences such as MACFA, NIWFA, etc). Membership to those conferences requires approval of the existing membership, which could pose a problem for new club teams, especially those unable to field full 9-person teams (NFC especially has historically looked very unfavorably on partial teams, including until recently a policy of suspending and then expelling teams that arrived at meets with less than a full team).

What if you're a New England-area team and cannot (or chose not to) participate in the designated conference? SOL?

What if you're in an area where there isn't a reasonable conference to join? It would be difficult for a Marist, Hamilton, or University of Rochester (all upstate NY, although fairly well spread out in that area) to join any existing collegiate conference of which I'm aware. Does that mean that they're locked out of USACFC's? That they get to make up their own conference? What if there are no other schools with fencing remotely close by (Alsaka-Fairbanks comes immediately to mind)?

Allocation of slots to the various conferences is, while not trivial, not nearly as hard a problem as most of the others involved with regionalization. A reasonable formula can be crafted in minutes. Decisions about tweaks to improve it are a bit more time-consuming and will involve balancing of a wide variety of diverse (and occasionally opposed) preferences/criteria. It's still not the limiting factor here.

-B

[seak]

My 2 cents on the whole regionilization thing:

If we were to do it, rather then use SAC or any other existing conferences regions should be set up, whihc are geographically reasonable. All the teams that are interested in going to USACFC's in that area come together and fence. This bypasses the problems inherent in using an existing conference.

To deal with logistical issues you have a regional coordinator (maybe board) who runs this event. As regional coordinators were already suggested, this would fit in with that idea.

[oiuyt]

Originally Posted by seak

If we were to do it, rather then use SAC or any other existing conferences regions should be set up, whihc are geographically reasonable.

What's your definition of "geographically reasonable" for this purpose?

I completely agree that a new regional method would be greatly preferable to trying to piggyback off of mostly inappropriate (because they're designed for another purpose) existing conferences. Some additional regionalization questions:

How many regions do we want?

How do we want to balance smaller geographic regions (minimizing costs, time) against trying to make sure that the regionals is still a worthwhile event in low-fencing-density areas? Do we care if we have unbalanced regions, assuming that we have a reasonable means of qualifier allocation that takes the imbalances into account?

Are people interested/willing to add an event to their schedule?

When in the calender should the new event take place?

Should some/most of the qualification be handled from the previous year's national championship?

What percentage of the slots should be given to an at-large allocation, and, if this is anything more than 0, how should these slots be allocated?

-B

[seak]

well reasonable for Maryland has to be within a 300 mile radius of the campus i.e. not Clemson and Florida, otherwise our travel gets very complicated and expensive

As to the questions all legitimate and things that need to be worked out. I would think though that qualifiers have to be relativly well in advance in order for teams from farther away to purchase plane tickets.

And the reality is that teams that have little fencing in their area might have to travel farther, sort of like some USFA sections/divisions are geographically larger then others.

[oiuyt]

I was asked by Bruce Capin to post the following:

Originally Posted by Bruce Capin

Congratulations to all teams that participated in the 2006 USACFC's. The competition was the strongest yet. It will only get better. I anticipate the addition of these teams for 2007 - UCLA, Southern Cal, UC Irvine, Cal - Berkeley, Cal Poly, Colorado, Baylor, Houston, Rice, Texas Tech, Wyoming, University of North Texas, Texas State, and possibly SMU and Oregon. We will gain more than we lose in my opinion. We will request all proposals are received by Jon, Brad, and I by JUNE 1st. Laurie Schiller is going to play a major role in the format change. Our goals are the following -

01) Maintain the team aspect of the event - it is the main reason schools attend
02) Decrease the number of bouts (and time needed to run the event) which will -
A. Allow for quality fencing by all competitors (much shorter days)
B. Allow referees to officiate at their best (avoiding fatigue)
03) Maintain the individual event - the cheering and excitement indicate it is important
04) Remain all inclusive to continue helping regions increase activity
05) Keep the event 2 days with the same amount of participants (men and women)
06) Minimize matches involving teams from the same region. They fence each other
all the time.

The new format will require seeding. That will be dealt with after the format is drawn up. It is not something to debate at this time. Here is just my idea given what I have read and heard. Assume 40 teams attend in 2007 (consider also limited strip space and referees) -

01) The squads from each team are divided evenly into 3 - 4 pools. We want to give
people as many bouts as we can. NOTE: As of 2007, we will NOT allow squads
to be incomplete. We will ask teams to have only (1) alternate per slot.

02) The squads in each pool fence only each other. Ideally, if there are 10 squads per
pool, every squad has (9) matches.

NOTE: If the women have as an example (24) teams, we can do (2) pools of (12). We can make as few or many pools as we want to maximize fencing.

03) After the round of pools, each fencer has (9) bouts. Take from that first round the best 6 A, 4 B, and 2 C fencers. There is your final (to be fenced later on SAT or SUN.

04) Seed all squads into a DE table. Squads fence the best 2/3 or 3/5 matches. If a squad wins, they are up. If not, they go to the loser's bracket where they fence until they have lost one more time. This way we fence out for place. NOTE: The number of bouts fencers will get on average is between 12 - 15, more if your squad wins.

Squads fence in the winner's bracket to a champion. Then point values are awarded for each placing. Add up the points to determine the overall and combined winners.

DE's add to the excitement since any team has an equal chance at anytime. Upsets make things exciting just like at the NCAA basketball tournament. That's sport. If a team is the best on that day, they need to win, period. If the best team on paper is eliminated, that happens albeit seldom. Brad can add his comments since he and I disagree (respectfully).

Brad and I discussed a second round of pools that would provide a maximum of 18 rounds (if there are 40 teams) that would allow the best 10 squads to fence for the title, the others fencing in pools for places 11 - 20, 21 - 30, and 31 - 40. I like this idea best as I told Brad. But IF we do NOT have enough strip space, or referees, it is not going to work. Texas can give us 24, perhaps 27 or so strips. That is why the DE seems more feasable. Maybe Brad, Jon, or Laurie can figure out a better way. They have more experience at this than I do.

Again, once the format is in place, we can deal with seeding. As one more example,
This year, we could have had 2 pools and 15 teams for the men (only 14 ronuds). It is enough to determine individual finalists and seed squads accurately. NOTE; all the strong programs will be seperated the same as in any competition in which fencers are seeded from best to beginner.

Another thought might be to make pools big enough to satisfy everyone bout wise and time wise. Then take the best 8 squads per weapon into a DE medal round. All other placings use win loss record, indicator, and so on. Each place again is given a point value for help in determining overall and combined placings. Personally I think fencers will like 15 bouts. No one will feel short changed, but there will be 10 LESS ROUNDS to worry about.

My email address is igmu_watogla@yahoo.com. Anyone feel free to comment. I am sure the format change is the last piece of the puzzle. I am excited about next year and hope to see everyone there. I love watching more names appear on that trophy. Maybe next year will be your team's name. Thanks for a wonderful championships.

Sincerely,
Bruce

I have only just skimmed it. My comments to follow shortly.

-B

[KD5MDK]

It seems to me with the so far somewhat fluid nature of USACFC membership (i.e, how many clubs participate when it's close to them, but won't when it is farther away), makes regional qualification rather tricky. Do most people think there are too many teams interested in going to provide a useful tournament under any acceptable format (i.e., it would be too big for the resources available) or is there some other reason why qualification seems so attractive? Is it perhaps something that would work better implemented later?

[dekko]

Does the complete squad mention mean there must be at least 3 per team or each team must have all 6 events represented? For example, if school X has two of the men's event complete but no foil squad will they be allowed to bring a team?

Also, if there is seeding for the teams in each event the folks running this had better come up with some good tiebreakers or lots of other problems could be created.

I do like the idea of having teams from Texas take on those from either cali or the far north east. On the other hand there is some good drama and passion behind AM v UT and Army v Navy. Maybe treating those from similiar regions as 'teammates' for seeding purposes. Hopefully the new format will allow for these teams to have the chance to meet up. Also, consider going to the 45 touch relay for final four of the bracket.

[Wafath]

A few thoughts, in no particular order:

- with subs being limited, we must change the substitution rules. If you used your sub in the C spot, and your A spot gets injured, you should be allowed to put your sub into the A spot.

- it is clear that he is pushing for a near-similar format with some reduction of matches.

- 27 strips and 40 teams does not work well.

- I don't like DE's for two reasons. First, you will have a lot of strips that are not being used as you get to later rounds, second, there is a good chance of repeat matches.

I want to do some math before I post ideas.

W

[Wafath]

Originally Posted by dekko

Does the complete squad mention mean there must be at least 3 per team or each team must have all 6 events represented? For example, if school X has two of the men's event complete but no foil squad will they be allowed to bring a team?

Also, if there is seeding for the teams in each event the folks running this had better come up with some good tiebreakers or lots of other problems could be created.

According the the USACFC Constitution:

Originally Posted by USACFC Constitution

Squad: One of the three weapon (foil, saber or epee) groupings in one gender (e.g. women’s foil squad) composed of 1 or more fencers of the specific gender from a specific school.

So a school would be allowed to send a men's epee squad, and nothing else, but would not be allowed to send three fencers, one in each weapon.

And what seeding are you refferring to, seeding into the pools, or seeding after the pools?

W

[oiuyt]

Comments re: Bruce's message...

I think the individual needs to be rethought under this proposal. We really don't want the majority of individual qualification to end up depending on indicators. Especially with the C-strip it would be quite possible to go undefeated and fail to qualify to the individual. With the smaller pools we would need to take more people up to the individual rounds.

As mentioned by Bruce I am strongly against any team/squad DE format at this event. Fencing out for position helps a bit, but is still not ideal.

Take as two alternatives, both assuming 40 teams (Bruce's figure). The first day starts with 4 pools of 10 (again taken from Bruce's suggestion). The second day is either a DE of 40, fenced for position, or the second, tiered, pool round described in Bruce's message. Option A (DE's) takes 6 rounds and is done, with all teams fencing every round. Option B (a second round of pools) takes 9 rounds and is done, with all teams fencing every round. Neither of these is a particularly long day. With Bruce's suggestion for how to run a DE those rounds can get significantly shorter (more on that below), but realistically, at least one pairing of teams is likely to go to the maximum number of bouts each round, which mostly removes this effect.

Mmmm, looking at it again, it sounds like the DE is not fully fenced out. Two losses and you're done. How ranking is decided in this case is not made clear. This would result in a 2-way tie for 7th, 2-way tie for 11th, 4-way tie for 13th, etc. up to an 8-way tie for 25th and 4-way tie for 37th. This does, however, allow for releasing of referees considerably earlier and the dismantling of strips. I fail to see how this results in "the number of bouts fencers will get on average is between 12-15, more if your squad wins".

The best 2/3 or 3/5 matches is very unclear to me. From conversation I believe that 2/3 means fence the three bouts with the swaud winning 2 or 3 bouts the winner. I have no clue where the 3/5 option comes from. 5/9 I could understand. Whether this is better or worse than a relay format depends on opinion and can be reasonable argued either way.

Doing a DE tableau like this raises the issue of how to assign point values for placement. Do we use ordinal rankings? The FIE teams points list? Something else we make up? The answer can have a large impact on the results.

Bruce included a note that having a second pool round runs into problems with lack of space. This is simply not true, as it takes exactly the same amount of space that the initial pool round took. Any space limitation that adversely affects the second round ALSO adversely affects the preliminary round. Ditto referee availability. When the first round is a limiting factor reducing the second round does not solve the problem.

Okay, now some basic math about the DE format that Bruce puts forward. I'll use his assumptions of 40 teams, following a pool round with 4 pools of 10. I'll use the assumption that we're actually fencing out to all places, rather than stopping teams after they have two losses. Under this scenario 24 teams have 5 matches each, 8 teams have 6 each, and 8 teams have 4 each. On average a squad has 5 matches. Continuing to use the A-B-C format (best 2 out of 3 bouts), as suggested, this is 5 bouts. Frequently the third bout will be meaningless. It is unclear whether or not it will actually be fenced. This results in fencers getting a total of 14 bouts for the weekend (9 in the preliminary pool, 5 in the DE's).

Under the tiered second pool system fencers get a total of 18 bouts. And we don't have problems with the final bout of a match being meaningless.

Advantage of the DE format: If a team shanks the preliminary pool it is still possible to recover and end up as the national champions. Under the tiered system, finishing (eg) 17th in the preliminary pool bounds a squad to somewhere in the 11-20 range.

Another advantage of the tiered-pool system is that fine granularity ranking is accomplished through many bouts against near-level opponents. This format allows mid-level teams lots of bouts against other mid-level teams (rather than just the last 1-2 rounds of the tableau, with all other matches being against significantly better or significantly worse teams), high-level teams lots of bouts against other high-level teams, and novice teams lots of bouts against other novice teams. For developmental reasons this is beneficial. For accuracy of results this is beneficial.

Personally I'm a BIG fan of large pools. The bigger the pools the better the seeding into the next round, the less effect poor initial seeding methodology has, the more fencing for everyone, and the better the event, up to time limitations. Boosting those pool sizes closer to 15 would improve the event regardless of what the second round looks like.

I'm sure I'll have more comments later, but that should be enough (or more than enough) for now.

-B