Sportsmanship Scores. They are a tricky one. Not only are they totally subjective but there is absolutely no way to rank everyone in the room based on sports so for that reason no one ever comes last for sports!! You may be unranked, but never last!
Those of you who have attended our events know that we hand out sports score cards and ask you to put all of your opponents names on the cards as you play them. At the end of the day (or weekend) we ask you to rank your top 2 opponents. Yesterday’s event gave 2 points to your best sport opponent and 1 point to the second best sport. Those players who enjoyed 4 awesome games against 4 great opponents struggled to decide best and second best.
The way we currently score sports means that you have to be an exceptional opponent to get 8 points. Daniel Newton scored full points at Masters 2015 (congrats Dan) and yesterday Dan and Alison scored 7 out of a possible 8 (way to go guys!).
The flip side of that is some great teams didn’t score a huge amount of sports points. This doesn’t mean that you aren’t good sports, it means that the system we are using doesn’t allow for ranking every team. The work around for that is that I could ask all players to give every opponent a score out of 10. I could then add up the totals, work out the average and then we could create a rank that way. Currently the sports scores take up a significant amount of time, it took me about 10 mins yesterday to create a matrix spreadsheet, each team was entered on the x & y axis. As a sports score came in I find the submitting team on the x axis and then enter the points to the teams they nominate on the y axis and highlight the team to show I have received the scores. When I have all the sports cards all columns should be highlighted and the sum off each individual column needs to be 3. I then auto sum all of the rows and input all of the final sports scores into the scoring program we are using.
Example of Sports Score Spreadsheet.
Team 7 obviously won best sports with 8 out of a possible 8, team 8 didn’t lose or come last, they simply didn’t score any points. It doesn’t make them bad sports.
This is all pretty simple (if time consuming) with the added difficulty of people handing me score cards and sports cards while I’m doing it, entering scores as well, calling time, people asking questions, teams that have lost their sports cards or round 4 score cards can I please get them a replacement (of course I can, oh great M has packed them up already in an effort to be organised so we can leave before the alarm goes off, never mind the card, just tell me what your scores are, I’ll write them on my hand) or didn’t bother to enter the name of their opponents as the day progressed because they would remember and they forgot who they played so I had to look it up or players wrote down the players actual names not the team name so I had no idea who to allocate points to so had to call them up to work it out. Yesterday took 10 minutes to collate, submit and check all of the data for 36 players – 18 teams before I entering it into the scoring software. Not a long time really but time you had to wait for results none the less.
If I had to enter and average scores for every team for every game that process would be exponentially longer. Project that to Masters where we have 100 players and 6 games and scoring sports would be something that sounds very similar to a mind duck. I could ask you to hand in sports cards at the end of each round and spread out the work out over the weekend so you aren’t waiting so long for the results at the end of the event. My concern is that we would end up in a situation where 80 of the hundred players were on full marks (100% for ease of explaining in this post) because they are nice guys and 20 would end up on 95% because ‘they were also great guys but I can’t give everyone full marks can I?’ So then how do we work out best sports? The system we have at the moment obviously has its drawbacks but it does (generally) give us a winner (and we have processes in place for countbacks if we do get a draw).
I don’t want anyone being upset that they came equal 8th (not last!) for sports. The lower scores really have very little meaning. The option we have is to only publish the top 3 or 4 for sports (the scores that have meaning) or to publish them all in the name of transparency and risk really great people being upset that they didn’t score well for sports. I’ll be honest, I’m leaning towards only publishing the top 4!
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. If you have an idea for scoring sports that you think may work well we would be open to hearing it or your opinion on whether we should publish all or only limited sports scores. We are here to support this community so I’m really interested in hearing your input on this. Leave us a comment here or head on over to the Facebook page and leave a comment there under this blog post.
I dislike your current sportsman system. It probably does give you a valid best sportsman! But all those guys who used to score 90%+ for sports get a 0 which im ok with, but you should remove sports from contributing from the overall score if this is the case as it seems like a heavy penalty to those who dont have enough mates at the event to give them free sports scores!