Standardising Age Groups (Trial)
This discussion has an associated proposal. View Proposal Details here.Comments about this discussion:
Started
If we want to go for standardised age groups across all urban disciplines, here is the same thing as in jumps.
Should we go with something like this?
0-9 Kids
10-15 Junior
16-34 Adult
35+ Senior
The best riders of all age group advance to the finals and compete for the Expert title.
To avoid medal madness, the age group podiums get small awards like ribbons or similar.
Preferably without an individual official podiums ceremony for each podium.
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I would vote for this!
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I'm super against this.
First, you can't just not have the ceremony for the new age group. If they have an award, they will receive it just like any other age group. It just needs to be fair for everyone. So keep that in my, if you add age groups, you're adding award ceremony time which we already is excruciatingly long.
Urban disciplines already have standardized age group. Junior and Expert. This is not standardizing, it's a whole new concept that would include jumps too.
Jumps is the only one that's not jr + expert.
For every age group you add, that 6 extra medals to give out. The amount of competitors in juniors is so minimal, dividing it in half again doesn't make so much sense. I mean having a toddler category at the world chamichampion, ouch.
This also lengthens preparation time, competition time, tie brakes, and award ceremony as well as create more job for the volunteers who run this stuff.
I don't get how adding time, awards and work would be beneficial to disciplines that already have standardized age groups.
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There are no standardised age groups across urban disciplines. That's the whole point. I
In trials it is required to have 0-14, 15-29 and 30+ as a minimum right now. So it obviously isn't standardised across street and flatland.
In trials the organizer can add more, smaller age groups if needed.
And by going with these four fixed age groups, we could eliminate the option of adding more, smaller age groups for an event. So it might even lead to less award ceremonies.
Unicon 19 had the following male trial age groups:
0-14 / 15-17 / 18-20 / 21-23 / 24-29 / 30+
That's six age groups. So more awards, more ceremony time, more organisation time (plus, for figuring out what age groups to pick)
A standardised age group system would probably lead to less organisation needed.
And less ceremony time. If you still dislike the long time it takes for all the awards, why not shorten them for the age groups
(Though this should be a whole different topic probably. But you could award age group awards in bulk without every age group getting onto the podium one rider at a time and standing there for minutes)
To your point of having a toddler category at a world championship:
It is stated that age groups should be combined if there are less than a set minimum of riders in them.
So if kids & junior do get too few riders, the problem would resolve itself. But if there are enough riders (which should be the goal, and I am working on that) they get there fair age groups.
So getting rid of the current flexible system of age groups in trials in favor of a fixed system with four groups would lead to less time, awards, work, and would make it possible to standardise it across street and flatland as well.
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Welp, you just totally schooled me on trials!
Then for trials and jumps that would be a step in the right direction ;)
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Yes standardize the age groups!
for example: I have a gold medal at unicon 19 in speed trials agegroup 22-25 years old :p
It is fun to have a gold medal but it doesn't make any sense to have different agegroups between 16-30 years old..
The proposed agegroups in the beginning of this discussion sound good to me.
Comment
I like Ian's concept as well, this is definitely a way to go for Trials, Jumps and Speed Trials as well.
As for the award ceremony, I agree with Emile: all podiums should receive the same treatment; and if we succeed with this, we will truly have less categories than now.
In Flatland and Street, the minimum riders required for a category is 3 - and at Unicon19 we did merge categories for Females. I believe it would be a good thing to be consequent and require at least 3 riders per categories for other urban disciplines as well.
I also like the age limits set for each age group. The only one which might need further discussion in my opinion is the border between Adult and Senior. In the similar discussion for this topic in the Jumps committee, we were already thinking between 30 and 35. That's a fair point that athletes peak even above their thirties; but on the other hand, we don't exclusively have professional athletes in unicycling. Perhaps we should look at starting lists from previous Unicons as a reference to see where would it be appropriate.
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I like Ian's age groups.
I think perhaps 35+ should be senior as 30 years olds are still relatively in their peak.
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The proposal creates a conflict with 1C.7 which has rules about combining age groups.
I would remove "E.g; There is only two entrants in the 0-9 kids Female category. The event director chooses to merge the 2 entrants of 0-9 Kids Female with the other entrants of 10-15 Junior Female category to create a new 0-15 /Kids & Junior Female Category."
and replace it with a reference with 1C.7.
I personally don't like the naming of age groups. Why is this necessary?
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It might seem like a needless complication, but our rationale to simplify the organization of age groups for medalling. Currently, we had some fairly wonky age groups at unicon to match best the amount of registrants:
0-14 / 15-17 / 18-20 / 21-23 / 24-29 / 30+
We discussed the benefit of a standardized system to improve clarity for the competition and also reduce organizational shuffling to match participants in age groups. I think all Urban Events are going to go in this direction and this unicon could be a test run in trials.