The new Dragon Boat West 2008 team rankings has been posted at http://www.dragonboatwest.net/index.php?page=13.
As rumored, we have a new ranking system replacing the points based standings system of the past couple years. The new system includes all teams that race in festivals and regattas in the BC lower mainland, Vancouver Island and the surrounding region. This new system was developed in conjunction with the Alcan festival ranking team – they came up with the idea and logic behind it, we developed the software that would run through the calculations and produce the results.
How it Works
Other broad ranking systems work based on race time performance. Due to our situation here in BC where we have differing boat hulls and tidal conditions, it is pretty much impossible to accurately compare teams based on time. Instead, this ladder ranking system works on the premise that you can positively compare teams by comparing them to other teams they’ve directly raced. To do this, we look at a single heat, from the lowest placing to the highest placing and compare the two lowest placing teams (last and second last). Then we compare the higher placing team to the team that placed above it (second last and third last). We do this until we get to the top two teams in the heat. Each pair of teams has a “winning” team and a “losing” team. If the losing team is on the ladder and is in a higher rank than the winning team, the winning team simply moves up to the losing team position, pushing the losing team down one spot. Teams that are new to ranking and don’t beat any existing team on it, are added to the bottom of the list. Repeat this comparison for every single heat and for every race, and this is how produce the ranking.
Caveats
While the new ladder ranking system is very comprehensive, there are some quirks which would cause it to sometimes produce unexpected results. An example of one quirk is when a high division team has a bad race (or mid level team having a good race), resulting in a middle level division team taking a high position in the ladder. If that team, by luck, doesn’t race any other higher division teams for a while, it will stay in that high position on the ladder. There’s also the issue of comparing mainland teams to island teams. So far this year, there hasn’t been very much “cross-pollination” of teams between mainland and island races. That will soon change after the Alcan festival but for the time being, comparisons between mainland and island teams won’t be entire accurate, although relationships amongst teams on the same side of the Georgia Straight will be pretty much correct.
All in all, it comes to the amount of race data. The more race data available, the more accurate the ladder ranking system will be.
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