[Richard Moore]

Cem,

That’s a really good question, I follow what you’re asking now. You’re right that the examples seem a little lopsided on this one. When we originally wrote the examples, I think we were trying to give the impression that one clear, obvious example of contact avoidance (eg a very clean layout bid near other players but with an obvious attempt to avoid all contact) would stand out to many players on the field and they would remember it. In other words, if several players remarked on a significant bid that was very clean, it might be enough of a very good example to award a 3. This is partly because such stand-out examples can be rare, or hard to remember. It’s even hard to remember, I think, whether a game was “mostly clean” versus “extremely clean”.

It’s pretty common for players to report small examples of unwanted contact, and there is often a grey area around whether this was “incidental” (“for the level of play”), so we also wanted to be clear that 1-2 “small” examples of (hopefully accidental!) incidental contact in a competitive game would not necessarily drop the score by a full point.

To be clear: a “Good” (score of 2) game of ultimate contains NO contact. But as we know, some (hopefully small) contact can occur by accident, and that doesn’t necessarily make the game “Poor” (score of 1). It’s only particularly bad spirit if the team is playing carelessly, or is keen to play with some physicality (more than their opposition expects) but refuses to scale that physicality down at their opponent’s request. One thing I’d add: a *single* instance of a very bad, hard, careless or dangerous foul can (and should) drop the score to a 1 (or even a 0 if it was horribly bad and cynical). We maybe could/should clarify that in the scoring examples.

Cheers,
Rich

[Richard Moore]

Hey Cem,

Rich Moore from the WFDF SOTG Committee here.

I’m not exactly sure what you meant by, “I’m asking that because it was happened in a tournament as some teams did scoring with that example sheet without arguing/gave 3points directly and some others did not (not satisfied with just one case and voted)”.

Do you mean that in some cases, some teams discussed a single instance of contact avoidance, but the majority of the team didn’t think it was a good enough reason to change their spirit scoring vote to a 3? This is an excerpt from the “Spirit Captain Role” document at

http://wfdf.org/sotg/sotg-downloads/cat_view/42-sotg-documents/133-spirit-scoring-management

“Spirit scoring is a team effort! Encourage all players to hold up fingers to “vote” for the score they think should be given in each category. People with outlying opinions (0s, 4s or maybe 1s and 3s) should speak about why they feel this way. Other players can then adjust their score, and then an average is taken.”

So, in other words, if one person has one good example of “thoughtful contact avoidance” they should tell their story. If everyone believes this sounds like a very good example of avoiding contact (and not just a small example), they generally ought to believe the story of their team mate (SOTG = benefit of the doubt!) and change their vote to a 3. However, there are times when the example given doesn’t sound strong enough to some people for them to adjust their vote, and in that case the majority vote should be applied.

I hope that’s useful, I think it might be good for the SOTG Committee to update our “How to use the Spirit Scoring System” document to reflect this clarification.

Best wishes,
Rich