1) "All regular-season collegiate events will be required to be sanctioned by the UPA in order for the participating teams’ results to qualify for official regular-season records and standings. ... The 2010 regular season will run from Jan. 1 through March 28. "
and
2) "Each team will be required to participate in 10 eligibility-verified regular-season games to be included in the official end-of-season rankings."
That means we have to play at least 10 UPA-sanctioned games before March 28 to be able to be included in official rankings, which will determine how many bids our section gets for regionals. This is a big problem for sMITe because we played 8 games at Southerns which was UPA-sanctioned, and those are the only 8 games we'll be able to get in before the March 28 deadline. This week is our spring break and we don't have enough players to play in another tournament (i.e. Get Skyyed at Stonehill this weekend). We could try to get two sanctioned games against local teams but again, this is spring break and I don't know if we can even field 7 players.
I think this new system is extremely unfair to the northeast teams because in some years, by March 28 there is still snow on the ground. We don't have the kind of weather that allows us to plan local tournaments in the winter and early spring, and we almost always end up traveling down south for our first tournament of the season. Our spring break just happens to be the week before the March 28 deadline.
This new system also discriminates somewhat against the smaller teams. It takes money and time to travel and it just seems that sMITe, compared to larger teams in the northeast, doesn't have the resources to do that.
Also, this year Yale Cup is on April 3-4, which is after the UPA deadline. So even though we are competing in that tournament, it won't count towards in our record.
Here are the (almost) current rankings. Our Metro Boston section (by far the strongest in the New England region) has a decent number of bids to regionals (9) but that's not including results from this past weekend.
So even though sMITe had a kick-ass time in Georgia this past weekend:
sMITe at Ria's Bluebird in downtown Atlanta on Monday morning for our southern-style breakfast (I don't have any actual pictures of us playing frisbee)our games won't count towards our ranking and won't contribute to the number of bids our section gets for regionals. How sucky is that.
Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?
**Edit** Comments from UPA about this whole restructuring 10-games-minimum thing:
http://upa-board.blogspot.com/2010/03/first-official-regular-season.html
