Importing results from the major junior events takes quite a bit of managing and is a three step process:
- Import the actual results. This will depend on the system the event is run on but, hopefully, we already have a connection with that system and we have access to the results along with enough player information so we know who they are.
- Merge the duplicates. There are always new players from these events but we are likely to have had results from the majority before so we will already have profiles for them but they are probably going to end up with a duplicate profile from the new event unless we have the ID for them for a previous import from the same system. It is surprising just how many of the new profiles are duplicates and we have to find them all and merge them before we can do much else.
- Allow for the gaps. We don't receive the results for all the junior tournaments which means that quite a few juniors have significant gaps in their history on SquashLevels. Given these juniors (the ones entering the major events) are all getting better very quickly it is very difficult for us to keep up with their true level when we don't have results for them. The result is that their levels going into the tournament are often quite a bit too low and that has a significant impact on the level changes for their opponents - and that's when all the emails come in!
The SquashLevels algorithm does assume that juniors get better over time even if we don't have results for them, however, these are the top juniors and they get better a whole lot faster than that.
To address this, we have developed a 'level override calculator' tool that can look through all the results in a tournament and find the players who seem to have come into that tournament with (a) no recent results and (b) and are playing at a higher level than expected. Armed with this information we can set level overrides for these players and, hopefully, the levels throughout the tournament will be a lot more accurate.
This tool is not run automatically but, on request, we can do so for the major junior tournaments.
We can also inspect an individual player's history and override their levels coming into an event if there is good evidence that it's not accurate on the system. This can usually only be done after the tournament has completed so we can see all the matches they played.
This is all part of our drive for accuracy though we can't perform miracles and bad results will still be bad results!
Please give us a few days to import results from these major tournaments and we should have a banner at the top of the page to say we are doing so. If the banner is down and there are still duplicate profiles and/or incorrect levels then do please get in touch.