Australian National Hardcourt Bike Polo Championships 2009

This open to non-Australians? I might be in Australia around then.

Well well, so I managed to get my shit together and will be in Adelaide at that time. Anyone need a third? Foreigner (band or nationality) team?

I know that. I will make the trip there that weekend.

Damon you're apparently very attractive to spammers.
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Marco!
I am the Duck.

The drunken nightmare from Oakland approaches! The indiscriminate flailing of mallet in a fury of beer and blood. Beware Australia, I am coming for you. Any takers on a team? Bringing bike and mallets. That is basically my polo resume.

Get ready to be shown how we play up here in the bush!

Yes it's expanding foam I was a bit sceptical about it at first and didnt take long to do a bit messy if you are not carefull on the application, I landed on it a few times during games and it worked realy well

Congrats Australia. Onwards and upwards to Australian Hardcourt.

Overall a great tournament Melbourne.. I really enjoyed getting to meet so many people and play some fantastic games (Panthers v PCP in torrential rain and Sydney v Brisbane 6 on 6 were my highlights).

One thing that I would like to know is why the first days results were scrapped. Even though the rounds were incomplete, it seems like it would have provided a good basis for seeding for the double elimination.

Here is my 2c. Names withheld to protect the innocent.

RR of 16 or more teams is unworkable and many of us organisers said so but it was retained. 10 minute games are 10 minute games, whether they are 3 or 5 goals. It's bad maths to count on games finishing early, which was proven.

The decision to go Double Elimination was decided not by the majority but by a few.. The first I heard of it was when it was announced the evening of the first day.

The seeding was done overnight and the games had started the next morning before we had a chance to draw up the brackets. That is the beginning of the problem. Then, people who were not organisers started to make changes to our brackets and made the situation far, far worse. Better communication and more information would have gone a long way there to create a fair bracket system and avoid a similarly messy situation next time.

In retrospect, the best teams should have played the worst teams to give an advantage to the best teams (earned the advantage), whereas I think we seeded the best teams with the best teams, which was unfair to them and they lost their advantage of playing well in the first rounds.

I wholly apologise to Top Centre who were bumped out of the Championships early due to our blunder, and vow to ensure that this never happens again.

** EDIT **
Also, due to the number of teams (18) leading to an odd number on the brackets, we had to run two extra games to even out the brackets.

I have just reviewed the brackets and found that T.C. did not play in the first 2 rounds.

The first 2 rounds should have been the 4 lowest teams, whereas it was almost randomly chosen while trying to sort out the brackets in under 5 minutes.

Ah, to be fair AJ, this statement is a little off for a few reasons

>> all this talk of Top Centre/Bush League unfairly getting shafted is bullshit, it could (and likely did) occur to several teams with just the same non-seeding-ranking..

The purpose of seeding is, among other things
- To pit the Best team against the Worst team, to give an advantage to the teams that played well. This is seeding.

We seeded these incorrectly, putting the best teams against the best teams and worst against worst from the start. So the best teams lost all of their advantage from the previous day.

In addition to that, the team they played did not have all of their players present and subbed 2 of the 3 players in their team. This was something that should have been contested at the start by Top Centre, rather than the end. But again, lack of information and process caused problems.

Here's the movie I made from stills from the tournament. check it out