Team scoring for high school competitions?

[Harold Buck]

I'm curious what people think about team scoring for high school
ccompetitions. In particular, the state fencing meet in Minnesota is
essentially an individual tournament in MF, WF, MS, WS, ME, and WE. In
each, there are pools, with everyone moving up to the DE. There is no
repecharge, and we fence for third place.

We then put a team scoring on the results based on the final ranking
within each division. The scoring system we've used in the past assigns
the following points (adapted from a USFA points chart some years ago,
with the main change being to allow for the fact that we fence for third
place) for first though 32nd place:

600-552-520-500 (1 through 4)
420-417-414-411 (5 through 8)
321-318- . . . -303-300 (9 through 16)
210-207- . . . -168-165 (17 through 32)

The top 3 finishers from each team have their points added to give a
team score. If someone in the top 3 is excluded, the team gets 0 points
for that spot. The scores for foil, epee, and saber are added together
to give an overall men's score and an overall women's score.

The difficulty comes in scoring the smaller teams. In the past, we've
given a team with fewer that 3 fencers in an event the points for one
spot worse than last place. Thus, if there were 16 fencers in women's
saber, and a team was missing a fencer, that team would receive
17th-place points.

The theory here is that if there were no points for these positions, a
team could simply get people who don't know how to fence to stand there
and get hit, giving them last-place points. I think this is fair, since
the smaller teams are already at a huge disadvantage, and since in most
sports last place is worth 0 points, not 200 or so. Secondly, I don't
think it would be good to have a scoring system that encouraged teams to
enter people who didn't know how to fence just to get points.

One proposal was to score the meet similar to cross country running: 1
point for first, two for second, and so on, adding up the places of the
first 3 fencers from each team, with the low score winning.

The big problem with this scoring system is that it ignores the fact
that the difference between first and second place is a whole lot bigger
than the difference between, say, 29th and 30th place, but the point
differences are the same. The system we've been using gives a large jump
in points for each DE bout that a fencer wins, whereas there's only a
small jump in points for being ranked higher among people who went out
in the same round.

Cross country scoring is different because the results of the race give
a fairly accurate ranking of the runners. There's also less variation in
results: someone who finishes in the middle of the pack in cross country
running would likely end up in the roughly the same spot if you re-did
the race a few days later (even if he or she ran a little faster or
slower), but a few touches one way or the other could take a middle
finisher in a fencing tournament and move them up or down *many* places
(e.g., losing or winning two one-touch bouts in a pool can make a huge
difference in DE seedings and hence final results).

In fencing, we don't have the same level of information because you can
easily end up ranked higher that a bunch of people you can't beat due to
the luck of the draw. Thus, I really think the current points reflect
the added challenge of winning DE bouts when the competition gets
tougher and tougher (as the weaker fencers are eliminated).

So, I'm curious what people think about our current system,and if you
have ideas about different methods that might improve things.


--Harold Buck


"I used to rock and roll all night,
and party every day.
Then it was every other day. . . ."
-Homer J. Simpson

[Carol]

Here's what is done in NJ:

For the districts, or county championships (usually about 4-6 teams
competing)

Each team by weapon fences each other -- A strip, B strip, C strip -- only
3 bouts in a match. The team scores are the aggregate of all bouts by
weapon, and then aggregate of all 3 weapons for the overall team winner.
The top 3 A strip, top 2 B strip and top 1 C strip fencers fence in a pool
to find the individual winner for each weapon. This goes relatively
quickly -- at the Passaic County championships, I think we finished in
3-1/2 hours.

In the case of a district championship, the top 3 teams by weapon and top 3
individuals by weapon qualify for the state tournament. They just changed
the format for this, so I don't know what the new format will be.

For the Santelli and Cetrullo tournaments (large state tournament of all
20+ HS teams)

There is a schedule of how the teams rotate strips to fence all other teams
(A strip, B strip, C strip). Team and individual winners are by the number
of victories and indicators. This is in effect a very large round-robin.
This goes surprisingly quickly, considering that each fencer is fencing 20+
bouts in one day.