NZSS Champs and StatNav

StatNav Posted: 8 August 2013, 1:37 AM   Vida asked a good question in a comment on the StatNav website this week - do the NZSS Champs count towards StatNav rankings? We hadn't included the NZSS Champs in the July events but at Vida's prompting we had another look. They aren't in the specific list of "National Champs, Regional Champs, Long Weekend Multi-Day events and various OY series" unless you define "National" to specifically include them which we hadn't. The other category for event inclusion is "other events from time to time, particularly if they attract a number of orienteers from throughout the country". The NZSS Champs definitely included a large number of orienteers from throughout the country but what was the quality like? We did the figures and were pleasantly surprised. Looking at the top 20 in each grade, both Senior Boys and Senior Girls had 19 runners with a StatNav Current Score while even Junior Girls had 9 (Junior Boys only 3). So, in principle, we're willing to include this event in the StatNav rankings and we'll redefine August to start on 25 July so they can be in next month's results. The question is, which grades should be included. For the Long champs it is probably quite simple. The rules say only Red courses are included and the only two grades to run Red were Senior Boys and Senior Girls. This is pretty hard on two excellent fields in Intermediate Boys and Girls but we think the Red only rule for forest events is worth protecting. If you look at the Event Page on StatNav for NZSS Long you'll see we've included the Intermediate grades for information purposes only. For the Sprint it is a bit more debatable. The event programme assigns the same colour grades to this event which would mean Senior grades only again. We're inclined to be a bit more lenient with Sprints and include the Intermediate Grades as well unless someone indicates that there was a definite and noticeable difference in difficulty in the courses set for the Senior and Intermediate grades. We have a few weeks before the August rankings are published so any discussion on what should be or shouldn't be included will be followed with interest. To summarise, unless the consensus is for something else. the Senior and Intermediate grades at the NZSS Sprint and Senior Championship grades at the NZSS Long will be included in the August StatNav rankings. So good call, Vida, particularly as your great performance at both those events will likely improve your overall ranking.   Tane Cambridge Posted: 9 August 2013, 7:08 AM   Im not so sure of your qualification system of what events rank and which ones dont. For example in late April the Otago Champs did not count as there was 5 people in the grade. No account on the standard of those 5 people in the grade was made, all of which were on the ranking list. However you counted a crappy OY at Orton Bradley, so a lesser quality event just because it had more than 10 runners in the grade. It also took no account of the quality of the field and some of the runners did not even count in the elite grade, yet it qualifies for the rankings. Who actually cares about OY's anyway. I care about regional champs etc, and treat OYs as training, so basically it stuffs my ranking up and really thats what Im complaining about...so maybe I should care about OYs or care less about rankings???   StatNav Posted: 10 August 2013, 4:49 AM   One of the things we have planned for StatNav in the longer term is to move from the current static page based website to an interactive database based system that would allow you to filter according to whatever criteria you wanted. Level of event will be one of the criteria so if you preferred to omit OY events you could. But don't look for this in the short term, we're still learning to walk and in order to run like that we would need to move off Weebly which doesn't support that functionality. The focus in the next year will be on finding and resolving the fringe questions like should NZSS Champs be included, what grades and, if so, what about NI and SI SS Champs?   Michael Posted: 10 August 2013, 10:11 AM   Love it. We can all choose the filter that shows us in the best possible light.