Friday, August 17, 2007

UPA releases poll on age requirements for YCCs

Fresh off the discussion and debate in the comments here on PlayUltimate regarding YCCs and player age requirements, the UPA has put a poll up on their website asking for member input... Except you dont have to be a UPA member to vote.

Check out the poll by clicking here.

What do you think of their question?


The current age restriction for the UPA Youth Club Championships is under 19 as of June 1st. This allows players with college experience to participate. Should the age restriction be revised so that players must be under 19 and cannot have played on a college roster?


feel free to answer in the comments

reminder: as mentioned previously, PlayUltimate will be holding an open discussion in the coming days as to what you would like the UPA to do for high school ultimate in the united states. specific ideas, specific questions, which will be tallied and put into polls where you can rank their importance, the site will contact the UPA with our findings. Look for those threads to be posted sometime early next week.

8 comments:

Ducky said...

Hi Matt,

Though I could have limited it to just member access, this first poll wasn't intended to be a member only poll, nor do I recall saying that anywhere on the website...

But at any rate, right now we are just trying out the idea of polls to see how folks like it. If you all think it's awesome and want to see more polls, we'll take it from there and get more sophisticated in the software and use. The more sophisticated the software the more reliable the data that comes out of it - always a positive when it comes to weighing player/organizer/coach input.

Which begs the question: Should UPA polls be restricted to member only use?

Thanks,
Meredith

McCabe said...

its a tough call on who should be allowed to vote in UPA polls, id vote for the way you are going about it now.

one more exploratory poll, and then one which allows only members to vote. and then compare the two results.

if everyone agrees, well then great, if they dont hopefully it will provide the basis for an interesting and more informed discussion about whatever subject was polled.

i just wanted to make it clear that all the readers here could vote whether they had paid dues or not, and hopefully they have.

Anonymous said...

I suppose that if the UPA wanted to conduct a poll with only members voting, then the UPA should conduct such a poll by contacting its members. This type of poll, allowing multiple votes, and only tabulating votes of people who happen to view a website during a certain period, is worthless. Nobody should attach any significance whatsoever to the results.

Ducky said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Ducky said...

I am sort of curious that when I went to lunch an hour ago there were 11 responses to the poll today and now there are 70. That's the biggest jump of votes in an hour to date, not to mention all 59 votes were for "Yes", changing the percentages from 50/50 to 60/40...Which makes me a bit suspicious.

Look folks, as the website says, these polls won't determine policy, but they can take the temperature of an issue on a national level. That said, if you all choose to manipulate the outcome by voting multiple times, though we've instructed you not to and you have to go out of your way to do it, you are only hurting yourselves and potentially negatively impacting the future youth programs.

Be honest. Use your one vote wisely. Like I mentioned before, this particular poll is to test the waters and see if polls are something that you all would be interested in and would be valuable for the UPA. But if the outcomes are bogus because people choose to manipulate them, then I wonder if this is something I should invest a lot of time and effort in.

C'mon, folks. This is disheartening. If you feel so strongly about this issue that you'd try to manipulate the outcome of the poll, email me and let me know your thoughts, you'll have a much better result: meredith@hq.upa.org.

Thanks,
Meredith

Unknown said...

You should just limit the poll to UPA members, so each vote is tied to their UPA ID#, and it would be impossible to vote more than once.

Anonymous said...

weekly polls are cool and it gives you reasons to waste more time on the website, but tie each vote to your UPA ID# so they aren't all messed up

Anonymous said...

I think anyone who is enrolled in high-school (or in the summer after graduation) or under 19 should be eligible. I've had classmates who, for various reasons, started their senior year at 19 years old and in a few cases, turned 20 before graduating.

Assuming they haven't played more than 4 years (I don't see this being a problem) they should be allowed to play. I don't think there is any pressing need to allow college freshman-cum-sophomores into youth ultimate, however.