Thursday, September 15, 2005

UPA Score Reporting Tool (SRT)

I am in love with the SRT. During the fall series, I spend more time with it than I do with my wife. Rodney Jacobsen has developed a great tool that, I think, goes a long way toward creating a sense of a year long season.

There are two major upgrades this year:

1) Seeding grids--If you go to the main tournament page, and click on the field that reads (in bold and underlined) "9 Open Teams", or "16 Women's Teams), a grid will come up. Here is an example:

http://www2.upa.org/scores/scores.cgi?div=127&page=3&tourn=1233

The grid gives you a quick glance at the overall head to head results, and it also provides its take on seeding the tournament. It is important to note that the SRT does not weight a higher finish at a tournament.

If you click on one of the squares, a head to head comparison of the teams comes up.

2) Import Formats-- You can now import a format into the SRT. After you have created your tournament and entered in the number of teams, you are given the option to import any format for that number of teams. Click on that and up comes the full pool play and bracket schedule.

It has been interesting to note that there is gamesmanship on the SRT. Not surprising. Sometimes teams, that are not at full strength, change their name for tournaments so that their results won't hurt them later in the season. I just noticed that Hot and Sweaty, a Mixed team from the south, entered in a result which dropped them in the RRI ranking...and the result was a win! Today, that result is gone, and presto....back up they come.

So there is work to do in terms of continuity and reliability of the data, but Rodney gets a big thanks. Adam Tarr, as well, as he entered in many of the format templates.

3 comments:

gcooke said...

I have been bugging the TD's as well. One of the things I have been doing is to write the TD's to tell them that the results of their tournament are important for providing data for other tournaments. Most have responded favorably.

One of the things that I didn't mention is that the SRT is also a free, albeit stripped down, tournament website. Hotel info, dirctions, links can all be there.

SRT Tip of the Week: Creating Power Pools.

After creating your regular pools (usually A-D), create your power pools in the I-L pools (you can rename them W-Z or whatever later) by entering in A1, B1, C1, etc...however you want your original pool results to break.

After the original pools are finished and you have the results, go back to "edit tournament" replace the A1, B1, C1, etc with the ACTUAL seeding numbers (1, 4, 18, etc). You will now see the actual names of your teams in the power pools.

Gambler said...

I also love the Score Reporter and how easy it is now to compare teams' records and such. I used to compile all that information by hand before thinking about seeding a tournament and it often took a LONG time.

My only complaint is that it is really difficult to find the results from a previous year. I wish there was a year sort as well for those of us who are into history...

gcooke said...

Gwen,

That is a great point....I think I will go to the feedback section right now.