This article turned out to be quite long!  Sorry…

I've just written up the results of months of discussion about how to organise our Open competitions in the next couple of years.  The intention is that the Women division's structure can fit nicely alongside the open structure - but there may well need to be a few differences.  Mixed cannot sensibly be done in exactly the same way at the moment, and so that has been left alone for now.

To start with the Competitions Committee argued about how best to allow the Tour to grow.  We came up with a great, if elaborate scheme, for providing ranking points at any and all events based on the current ranking of all the teams at the event, but allowing some teams to opt-out sometimes, ....  It was a bit complicated.

So we took a step back and looked to define what we wanted to achieve with each of our competitions. The idea was to make some simple statements about the competitions that could help guide decisions about how to actually implement them. Look here for more details.

I'd like to pull out a few key points:

- Open to all.  It is definitely UK Ultimate’s responsibility to ensure we provide competitions that all UK-based ultimate players can enter.  The Tour provides some real benefits (more of that below) but when we have attempted to make it fair for any and all teams that want to enter we have quickly found things getting more and more complicated.  A National championship series based one or more qualification rounds is relatively simple to implement, understand and in particular to extend to as many new teams as want to play.

- UK-Regionals.  If you are interested in the growth of ultimate you are likely to have discussed the need for people to be able to play ultimate near where they live.  It stands to reason that only a subset of potential players can afford the time and/or money to enter weekend-long tournaments across the UK.  I believe we should do more to support competitions that are aimed at local players - one way of doing this is to introduce Regional Qualifiers in the National Championships.

- Showcase event.  Good ultimate is great to watch.  The rare spectacle of ultimate being played in front of thousands of people is a great thrill (I've been lucky enough to see it happen twice in the last 12 months).  I want to see an annual event in this country where at least the finals are played in front of thousands of people!  To do that we need to pick an event and start pushing it… Nationals is the obvious choice.

- Does all that devalue the Tour?  I don't think so – and I have a very strong personal attachment to the competition and the prize for winning it.  All we are saying is that teams should know what they can expect of a Tour event: high standards of facilities, a simple system for benchmarking their progress; the forced use of peer-pools to keep the number of blow-out games to an absolute minimum.  Based on our experience of the dynamics that cause Tour events to fail we believe a key step is to ensure we keep things simple.  Chasing “fairness-for-all” and a water-tight ranking algorithm will be secondary to the ensuring that the majority of stable, long-term teams get what they expected: good facilities and plenty of close games.

- Can anyone still enter the Tour?  Yes.  The distinction we want to make is that - unlike Nationals - we will increase capacity behind demand so that we can keep things simple, not allow the playing-experience to be compromised by trying to be all things to all teams.  We have drifted into a position where teams are virtually compelled to enter the Tour to play in any serious/competitive ultimate in the UK.  We want to break that down, and provide some alternatives.  The first alternative will be the return of UK-Regionals-Nationals.

- Wild cards.  We have got rid of Tour 0!  Instead we will seed A-Tour 1 on the basis of results from the previous year down to approx 14th place, with some wild card slots for newly formed, rapidly improving, or strong foreign teams (and do the same in B and C divisions).  If teams from the previous year fold for some reason their place will become a wild card slot.  We will adopt a similar approach for each of the Tour events: there will always be a wild card place: three teams will be relegated, but only two will be certain of promotion.  We hope to attract a strong foreign team into each event – we have plenty of evidence that they want to come – and involving such teams can only add to the overall experience of the tournaments provided we do it in a way that UK teams know what to expect up-front.

- European Ultimate Championship Series (EUCS).  The annual European club series is a great step forwards - but it obviously affects our domestic competitions.  It has added two tournaments at the end of the year for our top teams, and also (due to international travel) tends to push those teams to need slightly different rosters to those that are needed at home.  That has squeezed our calendar and put quite a strain on any player that is trying to compete in all of the events.  It also had the effect of increasing the complexity of our roster rules and how we implement them if the Tour remained part of the qualification process.  By splitting the Tour off from the Championship Series we are aiming to give teams/players more choice in terms of how they approach the season.

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Of course many of these points are debatable at a detailed level.  What I want to get across is that a great deal of thought and attention has gone into trying to put our competition structure into the best shape possible.  There is plenty more to do – but I’m hopeful what we’ve done so far will give us:

-    Simplicity

-    Events where players can know and then get what they expected

-    A structure that will scale with player growth for a few years – maybe longer

-    A specific push for regional competition

-    More choice for teams and players when they plan their season