I am attempting to establish a rating system for flight shooting archers.
The rating is based on distances shot, archers could potentially have a huge variance in the number of shots taken after a few years.
I will be looking at past and current results. Here is where my questions come in. I would like to see current standings (current and past year) become the most important and looked at stat. I am confused as to how to apply value where the number of rounds shot may greatly vary. Lets say John entered 4 bows and scored very high on all 4. Now Jim comes along and enters 36 bows over the course of a year with maybe 10 great shots and the others mediocre. My gut tells me to ignore the mediocre shots as they might be akin to practice shots. Should the rating be based on most recent 6 shots, what if someone only has 4 shots turned in? Any suggestions? I will try to answer any questions.
Baseball rankings for hitting stats have a minimum number of at bats to be included, so perhaps someone with only 4 shots shouldn’t be rated at all. Almost everything I know about archery comes from your threads so it’s difficult to add anything else, but I don’t think counting only the most recent shots is fair to someone who had 10 great shots early on and then for various reasons the last 6 weren’t very good.
Are all usable attempts recorded? Or could the archer just fail to mention a shot he didn’t like?
You want stats per year? With each archer starting on January 1 with a fresh slate for the new year?
Do you require a single ranking stat? Or could archers compete for either best single shot or best average shot?
You could base ranking on the six best shots, but with penalties for anyone with fewer than six. For example, an average score of 100 might have 5% subtracted if only five shots were recorded, 10% subtracted if only 4, 15% if only 3, and so on.
Scoring causes sports to change to favor styles of play that maximize the score, so you want to choose a method that will encourage the sport to be played in a way that would appeal to the people who play it. So, what do you want to emphasize? Consistency? All-time best? Forgivingness?
The person’s best single score to date isn’t, in many ways, a bad metric. There’s the chance that you’ll get some lucky bastard to go out and score high, despite being a newby. But that’s only if all of the players are relatively green as well. Once everyone starts getting professional, luck will start losing to technique and you won’t be able to land a high score unless you’re able to use that technique consistently. But, at the same time, if you’re just starting a high-score-only system will quietly sweep all of your bad shots under the rug, so that could be nice as well.
But, as said, among amateurs, that system won’t be very useful while people are half just getting lucky.
Taking the median will, effectively, give you all of the same benefits as the highest-only, while strongly curtailing the luck factor.
If people complain that they feel like it’s making them feel like it’s no fun to have their crazy lucky supershots be mathed away from them, then just add the median and the high shot, and that should mollify everyone. It will give a hint of excitement when your score jumps due to a lucky shot, but should still restrain things enough that you aren’t blasting past regular, amateur players on your first day ever trying the sport out.
Are the shots taken part of a competition? The ranking in a competition can be more important than the individual performance statistic. You can have a runner with an average time for the mile in all races is quite low but they’ve never won a single race. Performance in competition can be worth more.
You need to clarify what you are trying to measure. If you are looking for the best shooter, then average shot is probably the best measure. If you are trying to find out who has made the most shots, then only count those. My understanding is that flight shooting is just about distance so why not do a average of last six shots and say you have to have six shots to qualify.
Is there a season for shooting? Sports with seasons start anew each seasons, sports that don’t like tennis and golf tend to have a running measure that goes back a year from the current date.
The way this works is that a shooter get to shoot 6 rounds in any class he likes. Each rough consists of 6 arrows. We only measure the longest arrow from each round. If a shooter is using the same bow in numerous rounds we will only record the longest arrow he shot with that bow. If a shooter does not wish to register his shots that is his option so bad rounds will likely not even be recorded. It started off that we wanted to collect data and encourage everyone to shoot but too many were shying away so we decided to make it voluntary and place the emphasis on giving the bowyers an opportunity to establish themselves as credible bowyers. Winning is always great but having your shots in the upper 10% category should have some prestige associated with it as well.
This is a big consideration in what we are doing. The broadhead shoot is not purely about flight shooting which is done with very light arrows and hot rod bows. The broadhead shoot we are doing is based on hunting bows shooting hunting weight arrows. I expect the winning bows will be hot rodded to some extent. We want to celebrate the guy who is building good performing hunting bows with good cast. So a big emphasis will be placed on achieving certain milestones even more so than winning.
That is an important point, We have a lot of good solid bow builders who will never win a competition like this but will always achieve the milestones we have set fourth. I would like to see these guys recognized with some kind of ranking. freak shots because of wind
or whatever will most likely produce shots out of the ordinary now and then. I don’t want to see the bar set based on those shots.
A ranking system is something we plan to implement only after a full year of events has been completed. This year has about 6 months left in it so it will be about 18 months before we actually start doing this so I don’t need to rush on it. I am hoping to be able to build it into our spread sheets.
It sounds like you want something like fishing records. They have separate categories for each type of tackle and each type of body of water. Some states also have a standard which everyone in the state who catches a fish above a certain size gets a citation.
You could have a top 10 list of furtherest shots with each type of bow and each type of arrow and then a standard which everyone who passes gets awarded for that shot.