Update from the MSVBA Rating Committees

[Lyndee Whitten]

Hi everyone,

Yes, you read the subject line correctly; the men's and women's rating committees have collaborated and developed a path forward, in response to Yankee's recent initiative to spread ratings into the higher levels. 

As a quick summary, both committees do have a batch of up-rates to deploy, which we plan to communicate to the membership at the same time (after notifying individual players) accompanied by a brief, united explanation.

As far as this report to the Board goes, I'll let Jim speak for the men's committee, but the women held an in-person meeting (which we rarely do) during which we ended up reviewing ratings for the entire female membership with active ratings (we were sustained by tacos, margaritas and Hershey kisses, which I highly recommend for a future board meeting, by the way). We agreed early on that in the past, we have perhaps been a little too conservative with our up-rate decisions. Reasons for hesitation ranged from concern over the players' likelihood of being asked to play, to the unavoidable comparison to other similar players who remain at the lower rating. Reviewing everyone at the same time allowed us to put some of those concerns aside and truly judge the player based on their skills. We leaned heavily on the rating worksheet; if the final number landed a player even 1 point into the next higher range, we agreed to an up-rate (where in the past we would have taken other things into consideration). The result: 17 players are moving up a rating, and 16 players are added to our watch list because we were not sure or haven't seen them play recently.

In our communication to the membership, we plan to stress that these rating changes are not tied directly to the Yankee initiative to spread ratings into the higher levels. However, that event did spur us to take a hard look at our current ratings population for accuracy, and as a result, we found that many players were truly underrated. A mass re-rate is a great opportunity to make corrections without anyone feeling picked on or singled out.

Timing: We do not want to disrupt any teams that are forming for the first Spring season tournament on January 7. We do want these ratings to go into effective before the RCO on January 20. We plan to notify players this week, and then send a general announcement of the rating changes to the membership on Thursday. That gives close to a 4 week buffer, which I think is pretty reasonable. We expect the usual griping, but hey! Such is the life of an elf. 

Anyway, that's the plan! Questions welcome. If anyone has any urgent and serious reason to hit the brakes on this, please speak up!

Thanks!

Lyndee

[Lyndee Whitten]

Hey folks!  For those of you who received this email, you can probably guess that it was intended for the MSVBA Board! 

No harm done, though, all of that information will be communicated via Facebook later this week anyway. You all got a sneak preview :)

Thanks!

Lyndee