Let’s talk about gradings

Clearly a passionate topic, and not one with a simple solution that satisfies the needs of everyone: players and tournament organisers alike.

Following on from some of the useful guidance and common sense approach published previously:
Guidance on badminton gradings

It’s fairly straightforward to translate this guidance into quantifiable entry criteria and create a ‘recommended playing grade’ for players:

• If you are regularly achieving podium finishes at one grade, then it’s time to move up.
• If you’re already winning at a certain grade, you shouldn’t be entering lower grades.

For example:

• “Got a good handful Bronze-grade tournament medals in your bag this year? Time to move up to Silver-grade events.”
• “Already won a Bronze tournament? A Copper event isn’t for you.”

There’s now a handy “Player Lookup” website that you can use to look up your most recent match results all in one place, and it translates your results into the current guidance: play.obanbadminton.club

If you want to see if players in an upcoming tournament are a similar standard as yourself, or if you’ve recently competed in a competition and want to know how you stacked up against fellow competitors, then there’s a “Tournament Lookup” tool for that too.

It’s based on the public results data published on TournamentSoftware for the given ranking period.

If a recommended grade still doesn’t look right, just click the Player Profile link and look at the raw results for yourself on TournamentSoftware. Some tournament info is still compiled by hand, so there may be errors: let us know if so.

Like national rankings, people will have a different grade in different disciplines: singles, mixed and level doubles, and the calculations apply just to the player’s past results in that discipline.

Please don’t treat this tool as anything other than ‘guiding information’. There’ll always be exceptions to the rule, and tournaments need flexibility to ensure they get enough entries to be able to run.

Are we saying “the moment you get three medals at a grade then you are banned from entering?” No! Is the tool’s ‘recommended grade’ always right? No: it just applies the guidance verbatim to past results for that ranking period:

• It relies on having enough data: you can’t be ‘regularly winning’ if you’ve only ever entered one or two tournaments/disciplines.
• Excelling at singles but never played doubles? You’ll not see a recommended doubles grade. Here is where common sense and the tournament organiser’s knowledge comes in.
• It’s less straightforward to apply the guidelines to doubles pairings, but common sense again would suggest that the weaker player plays up to their partner’s grade, rather than have a strong player play down and skew the playing standard for all other competitors.
• It doesn’t know if you’ve been out for 9 months with an injury.

There are inherent flaws in the limited grading bands as well, that prevent these recommended grades becoming mandatory entry restrictions:

• Does the playing standard of a ‘Bronze’ winner in an event with 100+ entrants in a Central Belt tournament equal a ‘Bronze’ event winner with 5 players in a remote rural location?
• If there’s only a handful of entries for an event, several grades may need to be pooled in order the event is viable to run at all.
• Arguably, there’s plenty of overlap between playing standards at the high Bronze/low Silver level.

But we’d like to think that this tool will inspire people to think before entering an event lower than the guidance suggests, and consider the ultimate goal of these tournaments: “will my participation make the event fun for everyone?”