There is a caveat on all that follows; in a team sport like ultimate, individual awards are nothing but a bit of craic. Don't get too hung up on them. Keep your eyes on the team's prize. Win some games, win a championship, win the spirit prize.
I therefore think that the tradition of naming MVPs among teams and at tournament finals is an odd tradition. Regardless of whether a particular MVP was on the winning or losing team.
Given that it happens in other sports, non-ultimate players can relate to these awards, and that's not a bad thing. And the annual IFDA awards are a great excuse for an fun awards ball. So I do like the awards.
There is one set of awards that I've found really odd though; the IFDA 'team of the year'. The one where a panel of experts chooses the 7 best players across all divisions. Looking for it on the website, I can't find it. Maybe they got rid of that? Comparing players from different divisions was ridiculously arbitrary anyway- and the panel of experts implied that the award had notions of not being as arbitrary as the 'everyone gets a vote' main awards.
I think Rob Kiely had previously suggested a GAA style All-star awards system: picking an all-star team for each gender, with players specified for each position. Such an idea would definitely allow non ultimate players to understand what the award is about. And it does seem to make more sense: no longer comparing men with women or specialist handlers with specialist deeps.
I bring it up now, because that awards ceremony is a long way away. I don't want to offend anyone that won anything, and any changes to the award system would most sensibly be made well in advance.
(this is a link)
PDF; The Flowers From My Mother's Garden
4 years ago
I'm a fan of awards. Just because the more awards, the more chances of advertising receiving an award. This is especially useful when looking for sponsorship or recognition from a university sports body. Or just in promoting the sport.
ReplyDeleteAlso especially useful when you look at team titles.
So pick a random word from each of the following lists, and you have yourself an IFDA or other governing body tournament:
1 gender) Open, Womens, Mixed
2 age) Senior, Beginner, Developmental, Junior, Under 17, Master
3 surface) Indoor, Outdoor, Beach
4 type of team) Clubs, Unis, Schools, National teams, Hat
5 region) Europeans, Worlds, UK, Ireland
So e.g. Women-masters-beach-schools-worlds tournament!
The best thing is that this list might be expanded in the future to include, other surfaces like snow, astroturf, water, mud. And more age divisions, like under 15, senior and junior master, over 50s etc. And further region divisions like counties, parishes. And then you have the paralympic versions like wheelchair, one armed, one legged. And then you have the other disc sports that can be added!
Then there are the club hosted tournaments that are too many to name. Lots of chances of awards for your team.
I'm not sure how serious you are. Yes, publicity is good...but then you brought in the snow and you lost me.
ReplyDeleteWe could crown a university mixed beach beginners all-Ireland champion. Or we can just give everyone a gold star.
Anyway, do you think publicity opportunities are better if someone in your club gets an All-star award (which local papers might understand based on the GAA all-stars) or if someone in your club is selected to the IFDA team of the year (which, confusingly, had a 5-2 gender split last time).
It doesn't matter how serious I am, I just like the point. The random word tournament is something that Celine (girlfriend) does when I say I'm going away for the weekend. She takes a guess at the name of the tournament by picking random words like done above.
ReplyDeleteWhile giving everyone a gold star is always nice, you can't really advertise them and I don't think the recipients will feel that they earned it. Especially if they are over 8 yrs old.
I think the 'team of the year' is a good idea in principle. The 5-2 gender split that happened is probably related to the playerbase in Ireland at present. E.g. there were no junior girls team competing last year. I'd agree with you that the name "team of the year" isn't clear as it implies all the people on it were on the one team. So "All Stars" is a nice name and would be more publicity friendly. I like the idea of using well known terms from other sports to make this sport more understandable to non-Ultimate folk. I don't think Ultimate should go the way America did for example when setting up society and making themselves different to Britain and Europe just for the sake of it. E.g. Driving on the right, different plugs, using dates with the name of the month first. Ultimate shouldn't try and do things their own way just for the sake of being different.
I'd like to see your breakdown of positions? You'd need 7 wouldn't you? Will you do it by O or D? Or is there the player-base (or the position specialisation) at the moment to do it by position? Should it just be left as something that is a bit more arbitrary like it is at present?
Here's an attempt of position breakdown:
- Handler
- Handler defender
- Deep receiver
- Deep defender
- Mid
- Mid defender
- Person that just plays all positions
Or
- Greedy handler
- Non greedy handler
- Pull catcher/puller
- Under cutter that is good at dumping and good at spatial awareness
- Cutter that has to touch the disc all the time, steals the space of other other cutters, and other handlers. But touches the disc so much is often in with MVP shot. Has to have very good throws to play this position though as is playing a bit of everything.
- Deep cutter that makes the most spectacular catches
- Defender that makes the most spectacular D's. If you're such a good defender that your man doesn't get thrown to, you will not have much hope in this category; you're not really making the sport look good though so you shouldn't be rewarded.
I counted upwards of 60 people standing up to receive some form of awards at IVs, seemed silly to me. I'm a fan of awards having some kind of meaning behind then, but it half of a tourney gets something then it kind of devalues it.
ReplyDeleteyeah. I spotted that at the presentation. Perhaps there were even more people standing up facing the crowd than there were in the crowd.
ReplyDeleteThe team MVP T-shirt thing seems to have almost become a tradition by now. Like I said, individual awards are just a bit of craic in my eyes.
Everyone knows which was the important trophy, right? Nobody's going to go home so delighted at winning something else that they wouldn't try to improve their teams chances at winning next year. Right?