Well, as Twats has pointed out, we finally got around to sorting out a formal response from ACTUA but it was way too late. That's a shame, because it would have really helped in the ACT to switch the timing of the single gender and mixed national events. We suffer from exactly the situation Matt Boevink diagnosed and it will be really hard for us to provide effective player pathways to the bulk of our players in summer without the change. Perhaps it's exacerbated by the weather, which ends up freeing up our keenest volunteers during the coldest months of the year when our player base drops because it's cold and because we move indoors. While it certainly would have affected our elite teams adversely in the short term, we can reasonably ask our elite teams to train through the winter, they already do it anyway to some extent (and my don't your cleats skid when the turf freezes solid - it's like playing ulty on concrete). Trying to convince new players to do it is much harder.
In any case, I'm sure Simon Talbot has crunched the numbers and arguments correctly, he seems like a pretty thorough and clued-in administrative type. And besides, we really should have made our position clear months ago.
That's all for today - yes, as Twats points out, I do have the minutes from last night's meeting but I'm not going to post them here until all the new committee members join the accursed Yahoogroup. James Ley, I'm looking at you. Speaking of which, I still need to write his player profile. Anyway, I wrote a guest blog entry for JdR's Brisbane Blog today so if you want something more interesting you'll have to track that down.
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Spend Winter planning to recruit in Spring, you fools!
ReplyDeleteOnly Uni-bums recruit in February ... :)
And John's fine reflections on Brisbane Ultimate will be posted next week.
Yes, yes, we get plenty of people into our leagues, it's not a matter of numbers, but rather with providing the players we get over spring and summer with some kind of development pathway so they don't think that league is be-all-and-end-all of ultimate and get bored and go elsewhere. Changing the dates would help us to retain new players and give them more options about how seriously they want to play, rather than simply increasing recruitment as such.
ReplyDeleteSounds like y'all need to consider a few things:
ReplyDelete- if people are leaving Leagues, ponder why? Can you make Leagues better? Hopefully your blog will become part of that.
- I'm not sure promoting Nationals is the best way to 'develop' most folks (aside from your true elite). Only so many can go these days ....
But then comments all offered from a lot of distance.
Oh so NOW you lot want some input. Grrrr.
ReplyDeleteLong story short with the "number crunching" and whatnot, there was no compelling evidence to make a clear decision one way or the other. My recommendation was to leave it as is until we have some clear evidence supporting or rejecting the change (ie: not just anecdotes).
It's an idea that certainly shouldn't be ignored and I sincerely hope the AFDA revisit it in the near future.
Sorry Talbo, we didn't mean to screw you over like that. I'll just comment on the three points you guys have raised.
ReplyDeleteI think most of our league turnover represents social teams that move from sport to sport (like work teams that try different things) it's harder for us to retain them because we basically shut down over winter so they just go elsewhere. They're not really bound to any one sport so if you give them an excuse to leave they'll do so. If you can keep them around, however, there' s a better chance some of them will get keen and stick around. For us, the time when we need to find keen players from these teams and move them out of division three (our least formal league) and into more robust teams that will keep them around until next year is Summer, since they've played one league already in Spring to get a taste for plastic. We don't have the volunteers to run nationals teams AND player development stuff at the same time, so for us it would be great if nationals was far, far away from glorious Summer.
We're not trying to use nationals to develop folks, rather we're trying to move them through the divisions in our leagues. Players in div 3 are only loosely attached to ultimate, but players in the other two divisions are more firmly attached and return year after year. The problem currently is that we don't have any free volunteers to run clinics or anything while the leagues are actually running, because they're training for nationals. Without pathways to get our players moving into more serious divisions, they move on to other sports when ultimate becomes unavailable.
I'm not really sure what we should do to improve division three, but the new committee is looking at options for divs 1 and 2 (div 2 is currently our best subscribed, just ahead of div 3).
The difficulty for number crunching is partly that our statistics aren't that great and partly that they don't tell us about what we want, rather what we already have.
I'm not sure what the proposal was intended to change elsewhere, but in Canberra it's not likely - nor do we need it - to improve the number of new players entering the sport per se (as represented by new AFDA numbers). Rather, it would improve player retention and the distibution of players playing at various levels in the ACT. If this were described statistically it would show a change in the number of players playing in various leagues. Div 2 would expand, Div 1 would expand much more while div 3 remained the same. You wouldn't necessarily get an increase in the number of new AFDA numbers being allocated. Rather, these numbers would stay active for longer.
Unfortunately, even if we have statistics that show where our new numbers are playing and how long they keep playing for, that only reflects the situation as it currently is. It will be very difficult to argue from this that a situation we have no statistical data on will be inferior or superior. Ultimately, our statistics will only be able to compare two strategies (say, for recruitment) that we already employ. The proposed change is something we have no real data on so we can't really compare it. At best, our stats might indicate to us a potential which might be unfulfilled (say, if for some reason, we never managed to recruit in September, the potential to do better would be reflected in our data), but it's not even clear that our stats reflect the thing we're trying to improve here, which is development and retention rather than new AFDA numbers outright.
Finally, we need to be careful about on-sided statistics. It doesn't really matter when we recruit the most players. The fact we really need is when the most people are looking to try new sports. We really want statistics about DEMAND for new sports so that we can adjust our SUPPLY of new sport opportunities to suit that demand. That demand is a fact contained outside the ultimate community. It might be reflected in our stats but equally it might not, and the only way to know is to find that fact out directly.
I strongly suspect Simon's work has taken some of this stuff into account, but I doubt we have sufficient statistical information to really determine what the best course is. That's not to say that one course isn't better than another, but rather that determining which is which is impossible to us via a statistical approach. In light of that, anecdotal or other argument becomes a legitimate means of finding out what option we ought to employ. We need to be careful about what kinds of demands we place on evidence in light of what kind of evidence is available to us.
In conclusion, statistics is the devil, and it's too cold at night in winter.
wow. that was really long. Can you tell I have ANOTHER essay?
ReplyDelete