2014 Youth Club Championships - Schedules and Seeding
Posted: July 29, 2014 01:25 PM
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Boulder, Colo. (July 29, 2014) – Competition schedules and seedings for the 2014 USA Ultimate Youth Club Championships are now available. The event will again be held at the National Sports Center in Blaine, Minn., and will feature the best youth ultimate in the world.
The 2014 Youth Club Championships (YCC) are the biggest to date, with more teams and more athletes than ever making the trip to Blaine to contend for national titles. Sixty-two teams comprised of nearly 1,200 athletes across five divisions will take the field August 9-10 for the tenth annual YCC.
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For the first time, this year’s event will feature a U-16 girls’ division, along with U-19 boys, U-19 girls, U-19 mixed and U-16 boys. Though a small field in its first year, YCC’s newest division echoes the growth of youth ultimate around the country and provides an unprecedented opportunity for girls 16 and under to compete against athletes of similar ages and abilities. Team and individual registrations were accepted for the division, ensuring any qualified girl was able to participate, regardless of whether her geographic region was able to field an entire team.
Schedules and Seeding
Seeding for a tournament like YCC is challenging, but USA Ultimate believes seeding should reward returning teams by using previous years’ results. Adjustments are made based on new circumstances for past clubs and using pre-YCC season results. Teams new to YCC are seeded below returning teams, using relative strength of area high school programs. Pools are slightly adjusted to achieve geographic diversity, when possible.
After a U-19 boys’ team was forced to drop, the division’s intended format was forced to change to account for 23 teams, instead of 24. The change brings both challenges and opportunities, and this year’s new format provides a chance to experiment for future iterations of a larger and larger U-19 boys’ tournament at YCC, while continuing to value fairness and competition across the division.
The division will be feature two "power" pools to start the tournament, consisting of the top eight seeds. These teams will all qualify for the round of 16 (pre-quarters) in the championship bracket (top eight bracket seeds). The remaining 15 teams will be seeded into four pools. The winners of the lower pools will advance to the round of 16 (bracket seeds 9-12). The second- and third-place finishers in the lower pools will cross-over, and the winners of these games will round out the bracket of 16 (bracket seeds 13-16). Opportunity exists for all teams in the tournament to win the championship, and no team will be eliminated with only one loss.
All other divisions’ formats utilize more standard pool play formats, followed by bracket play.
Schedules:
YCC event page: play.usaultimate.org/events/Youth-Club-Championships/. Game schedules are in progress and will be posted by tomorrow evening.
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