Do you know USAB is about to implement a new junior ranking system? With the change, your kids (or yourself if you are a competitive junior) need to travel more in the future in order to play in the right tournaments to get proper ranking. Otherwise, your kids will not rank high even though they may do very well in other tournaments. Do you know which tournaments your kids need to attend, and the implications to your wallet when it requires traveling, maybe to the East Coast on yearly basis? How about the dates when such major tournaments might conflict with your kids' schooling? What about the voting right of your own regional representatives when they are working with other regions on your behalf? Do you know that there are six regions in U.S., and North California has only 1 regional vote out of the six, despite the fact that a large percentage of our junior players come from this region alone? If you want to find out more of the above (among others), and find out if you can help change any of these, please come to the meeting this coming Saturday 10/29/2011. Details: The USAB Board Director, Mr. Fred Coleman and Director, Coaching & High Performance, Mr. Mohan Subramaniam will be visiting the Bay Area in the on 10/28-30. They will be hosting a Parent Forum and Q & A session to provide more detail information. Venue: BBC Burlingame Conference Room (1611 Adrian Rd, Burlingame) Date: Oct 29 Time: 2:00-4:00pm (1 hour parent forum & 1 hour Q&A)
From what I heard, regional directors are pretty useless now? Anyways, I had a talk with a few umpires and people part of the Jr. Committee about the idea of having tournaments in different regions. I'll elaborate on what was brought up later as I'm not home right now, but the main idea is that they want these juniors to play in international tournaments in the future, they want the juniors to prepare getting used to playing in different time zones, different gyms, different speed of shuttle due to climate area and etc. The regional tournaments are for each region, and yes, the kid who can go to more will benefit but hopefully this will change as it will be their 1st time with this. The two largest tournaments are still Jr Nats (12000 ranking points) and JIT (9200 ranking points) for 1st place U19. (Points differ per age group)
Junior ranking is pretty irrelevant though, lets face it, people base a good junior player, on how they perform in the national championships. All that junior ranking is good for, is in order to get a seeding a tournaments, however if you're genuinely the best player there, you should be able to beat the #1 seed, even if you have them first round.
Is preparation for international tournaments in the future the motivation? This might seem a good one, but - 1. Not everyone is interested in international tournaments or could afford it. Do we have the statistics percentage distribution here? 2. There are other means to deal with speed of shuttles. Simply use different speed shuttles, if needed. 3. Max. time zone difference in N.A. is 3 hours. This could be relatively easily accommodated by shifting daily routine by that much (or at least by 1-2 hours), pre-tournaments. If we're talking about true international, time difference could be day and night. How could anyone prepare for this other than arriving at venues at least 1-2 days earlier? 4. These are first and foremost (national level) tournaments, not training camps. Beside, with just 1-2 sessions a year, I'm wondering how effective a training this could be if they were training camps. There're actually 4 largest tournaments under the new system. Each player aspired to have good ranking must play at least 3 such tournaments, with JN a mandatory. The remaining 2 are from following 3 tournaments - SuperRegional (2 of them) and JIT. The last part of your post - "Points differ per age group" is also a contention point. How much a player should have if he/she grows up to the next age group that he/she might never have competed in? And how do we treat those who play UP? I heard they now are talking about banning players to play UP in JN altogether. For players that don't have Doubles or Mixed Partners, that means they'd play 1 less event. There are other open items - e.g. if you hold a tournament in East Coast where playing population is much smaller relatively speaking, you can expect the draw size to be much smaller. Yet, same points are allocated to players as if they're the larger and tougher tournaments held on the West Coast. Does this make sense?
We also find out very recently that out of a total of 6 regions, Bay Area being one of the largest competitive population only has 1 vote with equal weight to the other 5 regions. Is this a good representation of the voice of this region? Different regions might have different needs. There's also a very uneven distribution of players among regions. Is the current voting system a fair one from big picture stand point?
The "genuinely the best player" would be the only exception. He/she can rise up to the top under any circumstances. But what about the 2nd best, 3rd best (assuming you can determine them via a virtual round-robin type tournaments)? The top players under this new system now might not get a good seed, simply because they don't play the needed number of major tournaments. They might run into each other, and eliminate each other, while the lesser players would advance to the semi-finals and finals.
