An Overall Champion

[Jorden]

Hey all,

I have a simple question to pose:

If Routines, of all the common freestyle competition events, represents how players naturally train the least,
should it be the sole determinant of the official world freestyle rankings at the World Championships?

In my opinion, overall rankings would encourage more participation in all events by top players. "Bad days" would be taken less into account.
Drops would be less devastating in Routines and allow players to relax more.
Events of course would be weighted accordingly based on the physical effort required and involvement (ex. Sick 1 is just 1 trick, weighed much less than Circle which is 10 minutes or so worth of runs).

Discuss.

[Eskimo Joe]

I think that it should be a result of tallying up scores from the main events. If everyone feels that routines should be the most important, fine, but should only be a portion of the results.
Sick 1: 5%
Sick 3: 10%
Shred 30: 25%
Circle: 30%
Routine: 30%

[rjadamson]

I think implementing this would be a good direction for footbag. As an intermediate player not terribly fond of the routines format in general it would make me more excited to train and compete.

I am assuming everyone here has some awareness of the conversation in the "Freestyle Footbag" Facebook group started by Ahren Gehrman right after the Worlds 2012 footage/results started getting posted. It has over 100 comments from players new and old, and many of them are quite in depth.

Jeremy O'Wheel did clarify in that conversation that whoever wins each competition at a world championship is indeed only the world champion of that particular event. Many of us already knew that but don't seem to take it into account normally. Right now only one championship title of several has any merit in competition. I think the level of skill required to be a contender at the top level of footbag is high enough so that other events all have some value in indicating who is the best.

If we are going to crown one champion instead of many we may as well tweak the scoring system to represent who that person is as accurately as possible.

[g00d33]

I think it's a good idea, and is something I've been thinking about a bit since the olympics. As much as I personally see routines as the main event, I think it'd be better for the image of the sport and for the life of the competition.

[Air]

I think the idea of an overall champion is worth testing. I was talking about it with many people at Worlds. Me and Milan both agreed that it's quite stressing to compete in all five freestyle events throught the week. You need to be focused every day and can't really relax, party or shred casually until after the finals. So if there was an overall champion, it would reward players for competing in all disciplines.

Jonathan Schneider raised an interesting point when he told me that there used to be only routines, and Shred30 (or Shred45) was organized as an unofficial event at some point mostly just for fun. Then players would play much more sideline shred during the week and you would always find a circle to play in. Nowadays we have a lot of events, in my opinion too many. At Worlds this year there were very few sideline circles during the week. I played sideline shred maybe only twice because I wanted to focus on the competitions ahead.

So anyway, if we had an overall champion the scores could be something like this:

Routines: 40%
Circle: 30%
Shred30: 15%
Request: 10%
Sick3: 5%

You would then give scores to say, top seven players in each event. The first player could get for example 10 points, the second 7 points, the third 5 points and the scores for the rest of the top seven would decrease accordingly. In the end the player with the most points would win.

I still think routines are the most important event. It requires the most preparation and focus. The emphasis of different events can of course be dicussed further.

[fatbagger]

I'd like to see something like this,
Routines-50%
Circle-30%
Request-20%
Abolish sick 1, sick 3 and shred 30 as individual events but add them as required elements in routines. You would have to submit what you will do in your routine for a sick1, sick3, and shred 30 so the judges would know what's coming and could judge those particular sections more thoroughly(they'd know if you had to bail). You could have difficulty and execution scores for each of the required elements of the routine and as well for the routine as a whole.

I really don't think we can judge events like sick1 and 3 well enough to have them as stand alone competitions.

[boyle]

This is an interesting discussion - and a lot of these thoughts have stemmed from two things. First, having worlds, secondly a lot of us have been looking at the gymnastics and other Olympic events for ideas.

The thing with gymnastics is that there is the all around, and then the individual events. This could be an interesting strategy, that only a certain amount of players qualify to the all around tournaments (or to the individual, that would have to be decided). Players could qualify through marquee events which offer these same events.

I like what Aleksi was saying in that a top "x" get awarded with points. I also like the idea of benefiting winning an event. So say you win routines, you get 5 extra points.

I think this could be an awesome format to do some kind of "world tour" event, where each event has the same scoring system, then the overall winner gets a big prize. Nice thoughts for the future.

As for the breakdown, I think

Routines - 40
Circle - 30
Shred 30 - 15
Sick 3 - 10
Request - 5

[C-Fan]

I really don't think we can judge events like sick1 and 3 well enough to have them as stand alone competitions.

Actually, this year at Worlds they had a very solid system to judge Sick3s, which was objective and took into account things like number of unique components/concepts as well as link difficulty. It was very time consuming, but I think it yielded the most accurate results ever. Szymon could release more details, but I just wanted to say that Sick3 judging can work, it's just time-consuming and requires a good system (which does currently exist).

I think this could be an awesome format to do some kind of "world tour" event, where each event has the same scoring system, then the overall winner gets a big prize. Nice thoughts for the future.

This reminded me of Zeb Jackson's elite footbag rankings. One year, he took the circle and routine results from every tournament on footbag.org, weighted the bigger comps, and came up with a points system. At the end of the year (2011), I finished with the most points overall, and won a Hania bag (I haven't received it yet, but hopefully at East Coasts?). But yeah, I thought it was a cool system that incentivized participation in multiple events.