Sam Damon, the Eastern Regional Director for U.S. Ski & Snowboard sent out a note on the new seeding format for the U14 Eastern Championships. We felt it important to repost his note here to make sure all involved were aware.
There have been some questions about this recently so I wanted to update you all about the seeding method for U14 Eastern Championships this year. Having seen the wide adoption of randomized/full-field flip/butterfly (a.k.a. “TRS”) seeding at the U16 level, the Eastern Children’s Committee got a proposal after the fall meetings to implement this same system at the U14 Eastern Champs. After some good discussion, the proposal was passed unanimously. So the seeding at U14 Eastern Champs will work as follows:
- SG will be randomized
- R1 GS will be re-randomized (ie bibs 1-80)
- R2 GS will be reverse order of R1 GS (bibs 80-1)
- R1 SL will be “butterfly” (bibs 41-80 then 1-40)
- R2 SL will be reverse butterfly (bibs 40-1, then 80-41)
The idea here is that everyone eventually runs at the front, back, and in the middle. We’ve run this at a number of U16 events this year with no issues. This will also make it easier for the states and organizers since they won’t have to assign seeds and shuffle as much paper around.
If we have to run the events out of the scheduled order for some reason, we will stick with the concept outlined above: the speed event will have it’s own separate randomization, and the four runs of tech will have one randomization followed by flip/butterflies, not matter what order the events are run in.