Rankings Update 25/Oct/2022

Feedback

Since the launch of the new England Squash rankings based on SquashLevels, we have received a lot of feedback from players and parents through email, Facebook and our recent survey, nearly all of which has been focused on the junior rankings. In general, there's good feedback around the use of SquashLevels but there have been some real concerns raised that we have taken on board:

• It's possible to 'game' the system by adding 'shock' results for juniors such as unexpected wins against their parents...
• If you can get a level and England ranking from matches outside of the sanctioned events, there's little point in attending the sanctioned events.
• As every point counts, it encourages strong players to hammer their weaker opponents in order to protect their level and their ranking.
• If every match a junior plays counts towards their England rankings then they have no opportunity to relax, enjoy the game or even practice in a competitive environment.
• It's possible that some juniors will choose to only play the first day of an event to protect their level on the second day. There should be some incentive for players to play the whole event.

Changes

We have made some changes that we feel will go some way to addressing these concerns and expect to have these in place for the November rankings. Details below. Please look out for further communication at the time.

Gaming the system

The vast majority of matches on SquashLevels are from organised events and leagues so the opponents are pre-determined and, through natural organisation, the players are generally reasonably well matched. Not always but, most importantly, a young junior is not going to be playing their parent or other high level adult in these matches.

The concerns are really aimed at the possibilty of adding 'friendlies' where there is no external control over who the players are. SquashLevels already has controls in place and does not allow friendlies between players that are very different levels so this is covered to some extent but we have made a change so that results from friendlies do not count if one or both of the players are England juniors.

We looked at doing the same for box (internal club league) results but there are quite a few county organised boxes for juniors so they need to have at least some effect on their level so the change we're making here is to reduce the weighting of box games from 50% to 25% if one or both of the players are England juniors.

Motivation to attend sanctioned events

When we launched the new rankings, we set the minimum number of attended sactioned events in the last 12 months to just one. This was to make the rankings inclusive and also to recognise that some of the events of the previous 12 months didn't have results entered.

We have increased this to a minimum of 3 sanctioned events now with a view to increasing it further over the next few months to 5 once everyone has had a chance to attend events run on SportManager.

We still want to be inclusive but players will need to attend more events to be included in the rankings.

Not hammering weaker players

The SquashLevels algorithm applies a lot of behavioural modelling and this case is a good example. When a strong player plays a weaker opponent, they are expected to play "down" and give them a good game - not hammer them. The algorithm allows them to play down by double what is typical before they lose any level at all and even then, it is heavily damped.

The weaker player also has a chance to increase their level if they play better than expected - allowing for the better player to be playing dow. The emphasis is on rewarding the weaker player for playing well rather than penalising the stronger player for playing down.

Providing juniors with 'low pressure' matches

By discounting friendlies and significantly reducing the weighting of box matches, juniors should have plenty of opportunity to play compeitive matches without impacting their England Squash ranking.

If they enter other events or play county league matches, they will count as before.

Completing events

The previous points based rankings only counted events if all rounds of the event were completed. It would be good to do something like that for the SquashLevels based rankings but we don't have a solution at this time. Please look out for further communication on this one.