Stakeholders in the Canadian squash community met at Squash Canada’s 2016 AGM in Ottawa to discuss many aspects of the sport and a number of exciting initiatives. As part of the discussions throughout the weekend, representatives from across the country participated in a workshop led by Jeff Deverill, Squash Canada’s key rankings volunteer, to outline the current challenges with existing practices and the desired future of a squash ranking system in Canada.
Stakeholders in the Canadian squash community met at Squash Canada’s 2016 AGM in Ottawa to discuss many aspects of the sport and a number of exciting initiatives. As part of the discussions throughout the weekend, representatives from across the country participated in a workshop led by Jeff Deverill, Squash Canada’s key rankings volunteer, to outline the current challenges with existing practices and the desired future of a squash ranking system in Canada.
Jeff Deverill leads the group through the SC Rankings/Membership Workshop
Squash Canada and the Provincial/Territorial representatives endorsed the desire to have a unified, nation-wide ranking system at all levels of participation. What that ranking system will be, when and how it will be implemented is still to be determined but there was a commitment made by all to fully engage in the development process to ensure that collective needs can be met with one system. In addition to the rankings, the desired system would look to explore many other business functions such as membership management, tournament administration, officials’ certification, etc. One unified system is expected to provide many efficiencies and greater coordination of player results and rankings.
Brainstorming in action: a collection of ideas for the future of an unified nationwide rankings systems
Squash Canada will take the lead in the project, working closely with partners, members and key stakeholders. As the project moves forward the first steps will be collaborating with partners and members to establish what a system needs to be able to do. A project plan will be established and a committee formed with stakeholder representatives to help guide the process. A one to two-year development process is anticipated.
An interim step will be to create and utilize a new database to compile results and create the various ranking reports. Tournament Software will remain as Squash Canada’s tournament administration software, tournament results uploaded to the new database.
Addressing the current status of the Canadian Rankings System was identified as one of the highest priorities identified by respondents to Squash Canada’s strategic planning telephone interviews and online survey. Currently, there are a multitude of tournament results platforms being used around the country, that do not readably ‘speak’ or upload to the existing national player results database being managed by Squash Canada. Consequently, without all results being imported into the database, and in a timely manner, the rankings generated were most often not accurate representations of where a player really stood.
More information will be made available as this initiative is further designed.
