Rankings

What do the national rankings mean? This is something I've been thinking about the last few days. The regional/series rankings make sense - for each age group it ranks the snowboarders based on how they do against the others in their series. Each series holds 3-5 races for each discipline and they earn points based on how they finish. The riders are then ranked based on their points. This makes sense, they race against each other then are ranked.

What doesn't make as much sense, or at least doesn't provide much useful information, is the national rankings. Based on the points earned at each race, the riders are ranked nationally. The problem is that you don't know how good the other riders really are (or aren't) since you're not riding against them, it's strictly based on the points earned. What that means is that if you're the only one in a race, you earn 1010 points (1000 for first plus 10 for each racer, so if there were three racers first place would earn 1030 points). Surprisingly, at least in Whitney's age group, there wasn't a bunch up towards the top. There were several girls who were the only ones in their series, the only series that had more than one girl racing was the Western New York series, the Great Lakes series and maybe one out west. I'm a bit surprised that there weren't a bunch of girls with 3030 points, Whitney was only tied with one other girl at the last rankings.

So, while on the one hand I was super excited that Whitney was ranked 1st for a week earlier in the season and finished tied for 3rd, what does that really mean? There's no way to really compare her to the other racers until they get to Nationals. The other downside is that not all the racers go to Nationals. Whitney will be the top ranked girl in her age group there and to fill out the numbers, they eventually ended up inviting all the girls and only 12 accepted.

We do have a pretty good idea of how good she is though. At several of her races this year she  had the opportunity to race against guys who were in her age group or older. She was able to either beat them or keep pace with them. These were guys who were competitive, not slackers, so for her to keep up with them was really good; she can also keep up with her coaches. She's a strong rider and should do really well at Nationals, no matter her ranking.