The IRF Launches Racketlon World Ranking System
Date: 2003-03-09
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The International Racketlon Federation today launched a first Racketlon World Ranking system and a first complete ranking list covering all players that have taken part in international racketlon tournaments sofar.

The ranking system replaces the manually put together top 10 lists that have been published on Racketlon.com since last July and the objective of the ranking is that it will work as an incentive for people that will now be able to watch their names climb the ladder as soon as they take part in their first Racketlon Tour event. In addition it will serve as a tool for tournament managements to allocate people into adequate classes so that they get to play equals.

The present ranking is based on results in all international racketlon tournaments that have been held sofar after that first breakthrough in Gothenburg in the autumn of 2001. Here is the full list:

Gothenburg Racketlon World Open, November 2001
Racketlon Cup, Stockholm, January 2002
Finnish Open, Lahti, May 2002
Scottish Open, Monifieth, August 2002
English Open, London, September 2002
Gothenburg Racketlon World Open, November 2002
Swedish Open, Stockholm, January 2003

Starting with Swedish Open last January, the tournaments on the IRF Racketlon World Tour will be used as a basis for the ranking.

National rankings will continue to exist in parallell to the world ranking. This is especially true for the Swedish ranking which contains a couple of tournaments that are not part of the IRF Racketlon World Tour.

There can never be a perfect ranking list. In any imaginable list chances are that you will be able to find players above your own name that you know that you beat easily. And there will probably also be players below that beat you. This is especially true for the game of racketlon since the profiles (strong sports, weak sports...) of the players are so important to the outcome of any match.

There are also particular problems associated with a World Ranking system at this stage of Racketlon development when there is not yet a mature international racketlon community that travel around on tournaments as in more established sports such as any of the four individual racket sports. We have reason to expect that most of the people that will take part in the tournaments of the tour will be local players that will not travel to any tournaments abroad. That is a big difficulty for someone that wants to create a ranking. How easy is it to tell if player A in country A is better than player B in country B if they do not take part in the same tournaments?

In addition, the countries represented on the tour have very different racketlon backgrounds. Two of them, Sweden and Finland, contain quite mature racketlon communities with several players that have competed for ten years or more. Others, like England and Bulgaria are true beginner nations with very few players. Austria and perhaps also Scotland (the fastest growing racketlon nation in Europe) fall somewhere in between. There is reason to expect that this difference in experience will reflect itself in very varying standard in, at least, the open classes. The IRF realizes that this will mean that ranking points will probably be cheaper at some tournaments and more expensive at others which might have justified varying weights in the ranking system. At this stage, however, it has been decided to generously give all countries the same preconditions; All tournaments will carry the same prestige factor=1 (under the only condition that they are marketed reasonably well and attract at least 50 people). The only exception will be the World Championships in Gothenburg in November that will have twice the weight.

Nevertheless, the system is a start and, given the above constraints, the IRF hope that the list will come reasonably close to reflecting true capacity at least among the players that will take part in several of the tour events.

Comments on the ranking system are appreciated and should be sent to racketlon@hotmail.com

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