Spring Tune-up Tourney

So,

We had our annual ultimate spring speed point tournament this weekend. I'm hoping the team name change to Shuffle Monkeys was a fortuitous omen as we did phenomenally well, especially in comparison to some of our previous Longshot showings. We played four round robin games, came in first in the pool, then we had two playoff games. Unfortunately we lost our pool's Championship game to a team that we had just eked out a win against in regular play.

The last game could honestly have gone either way, but the other team's captain made a smart call when choosing which end of the field he wanted to start the game from. He put the wind behind him and we had a really tough completing passes as the wind started to pick up. We battled back from an early deficit, but weren't able to close the gap. It happens.

And this is the first time I've played in one of these tournaments and haven't been completely exhausted at the end of it. I know it's not because of my fitness level, which is somewhat of a joke right now.

One of the crappy things that keeps coming up with this tourney is that there are always teams playing out of their division. Nobody wants to be the Intermediate team getting the snot wailed out of them by a Competitive team, but somehow one always sneaks in. Or, conversely a Recreational team signs up, because they just really want to play, and then they get upset because they're used as a punching bag by all the other teams. This is a recurring problem, and our group has been on the receiving end of it once or twice. No one likes paying money to get humiliated on the field.

Here's my suggestion on how to fix that.

When you create an electronic profile with our league, which is mandatory already, you have to put down what you think your skill level is for whatever sport you’re playing. That way if you sign up for a tournament the league can look at your individual skill levels and surmise what kind of team you think you are and attempt to schedule your games against teams with similar skill sets. It’s not a perfect solution. Some teams and players will have skill levels on the cusp between levels and you’re relying on people to be honest about their abilities. But when you’ve got a whole sport based around self refereeing I think you can rely on the majority of people to be truthful. They want to play against teams in their division.

That’s my two cents and I don’t think it’s that hard to implement.