Agenda

[Will Stranks]

I was thinking that we should compile a list of things that need to be done or should be started. I know Eric had posted a list of things at some point, so maybe we could start with that. I think it would be good to have a list of several items, then prioritize them and get started.

Mario pointed out that getting a league started should be a priority, and I agree with that, so i'll put it on the list, as well as some things I can remember that people have discussed before. Feel free to add to this, then we can filter out ideas later so add in everything:

1. Starting a leage
2. Getting a Canadian Ranking system in place
3. Having a national tournament, or set of tournaments.

[Eric Dunn]

Will S. kind of refered to this, but i'll restate just to be clear.
Behind any ranking system, there has to be a reason to rank the players.
For the purposes of TSAC the main motivation to rank our players would be to determine who are our National Champions - Singles and Doubles, Men's, Women's, Junior, and Senior.
and to determine who gets' to represent Canada at various ITSF Team related events (like the World Cup).

So given these priorities, then that will speak to how points should be awarded. So then it would make sense to award more points to those players with international exposure over those players that just stay in Canada. Cause after all they are being ranked to go and compete on an international stage.

Yes, a ranking system like this is not optimal to promote the game at home, as it will award our players to travel abroad, but possibly a system could be found that allows both promotional efforts to thrive. Possibly spots on the National Team could be awarded to those players that have proved they are the best Canadian players agaisnt other Canadians. And other spots would be awarded to those players that prove they are the best canadian players agaisnt non-Canadians (intenationally).

[Will Stranks]

Ok. I have talked to enough people in different cities that I have realized this system I proposed won't work.

1. Too many cities/leagues have there own format and it is working right now.
2. It would be difficult to make the points system work out well combining other results from international tournaments.

Either way, I don't want to give up. I think we can find a solution that will work for all of the Canadian foosball players. Because of that, I have come up with a revised proposal that I think would help us to achieve our goals while still allowing leagues to continue as they are.

I still think netfoos is a really cool feature, and I think it could be worked into this. However it would also be easy to do something at this smaller scale without the capabilities of netfoos. I propose that we run 4 tournaments a year in each region. These could either be moved around within each region, or run in the same location.

If we can't have tournaments run in certain regions because of lack of player base, or lack of people willing to direct the tournaments, we would have to hope the top players from those regions are willing to travel.

I could see it being easy for us in Alberta to have 2 small tournaments in Edmonton and 2 in Calgary. I'm not talking large scale at all, but if you have a minimum of 8 players I think that would be acceptable for now. It would be smart to make this as easy as possible for tournament promoters or current TSAC executives if they want to run these events. If we do enough advertising via message boards and word of mouth, we can probably reach enough foosers to make this possible. Also I think the event format should be very simple, with only open doubles and open singles. The points could be run any number of ways... Either points per place... like if you come in 1st you get 50 points, 2nd you get 25 points etc. or we could use Elo. I think in this structure we would not have enough results to make Elo accurate, and also in cities with much larger turnouts the top players would end up with WAY more points than in cities with potentially better players, but smaller player bases.

It would be great if we could have a National Championships, or Canadian Open, to follow the regional events. This way all of the top players, or players that would consider traveling for foosball, would have the option to go to the 4 regional tournaments, and one national tournament.

Then comes the international tournaments. I think if we could use Canadian points + Itsf points to decide on national champions, that would be ideal. We do represent the ITSF, so I think giving credit to those events - and not other international events - would be acceptable. It would be good to weight ITSF points higher. Either by making canadian points lower or by adding a multiplier to ITSF points.

So that is pretty much all I have. I totally want as many suggestions and ideas as possible, so we can sort through several opinions and come up with something positive for everyone. Let me conclude by saying that if we can start a way to have a national ranking system and therefor have a way to pick our national team, it will give a lot of incentive to a lot of young aspiring foosball players out there. In the short, and long term, that would be good for our game.

[Eric Dunn]

I think we're getting ahead of ourselves a bit here. Right now we just need to set our priorities for the year, and obviously, a ranking system, etc is extremely important. But it's not something that can be solved in a small amount of time. So lets put together a ranking committee or something, and get a bunch of people together to work together and figure out a good system.

For rankings, i think its more important at this point to come up with the requirements for what we want in a ranking system, and then give these requirements to the rankings committee, and give them a month or something to come up with some proposals for a ranking system that will satisfy those requirements.

[Will Stranks]

I understand that Eric, I don’t think we could implement it for this year, but if we plan 1 year ahead it gives us tons of time. Honestly if we ever want something like this to happen we have to start somewhere.

We do need to put together a committee to get the job done until a plan can be put into effect. I still don’t think that should stop us from making a plan for the future.

[Eric Dunn]

when i said, 'we're getting ahead of ourselves here', all i meant was that this discussion on in this thread should simply be about what things we want to put on our agenda - and once the priorities are decided and agreed upon, then we go into deeper discussion on each topic in the order that we set.

This discussion got side tracked into talking about the low level details of what we could use as a ranking system. and i totally agree its a very important thing to do, and something we could start this year.

Its just that history has shown me that we tend to get distracted every year, and when it comes time to putting together our National Teams and Champions its always a last minute band-aid solution we're forced to come up with - and that's not fair to the players involved.

I'm not going to have a log of time for TSAC stuff until after the HOFC in Vegas, so i'll be able to add more after then.

[Will Stranks]

Hey.

I just added 3 tournaments as tests into the edmonton netfoos account. I am deleting them out soon so that we can just run our league.

This took me 8 minutes:
adding 8 players named Van1 through Van8
adding 8 players named Tor1 through Tor8
Creating a singles tournament with just Van Players,
Creating a singles tournament with just Tor Players,
Creating a tournament involving all of the 16 players mentioned.
Completing the brackets so that all results were posted on netfoos.com
adding all of the results into an excell spreadsheet,
having netfoos create the points for all of the players used.
adding those points into the excell document.

Now I have it attached here. This is really easy guys. Check out the points. Sorry to toronto people, I just decided a vancouver test player would win the tournament, i didn't have specific players in mind when i did this. Any questions?

[derce]

i will send you the files i have for managing our ranking system, with an exhauxtive description as soon as i have time... probably not b4 friday. i could also detail our league if you're ever interested.