Coaches,
For those of you who plan on playing in our 2018-19 CNR Winter Basketball League, this will be an action packed email of information. I’m going to provide you with some information on how to properly analyze and give an accurate ranking. In addition, I’ll give you an easy link that will show you everything we have for leagues and tournaments for this winter which is a one-stop shop for everything you need.
Note to readers- this is a few minute read. Please make sure you read this and understand it before ranking your team.
Rankings- While we do our best in this league to make everyone’s schedule as convenient as possible by placing you at desirable locations and working around your conflicts, the most important part of this league is creating competitive matchups. It is far from a perfect science in getting this done.
The biggest key in creating a competitive matchup involves a coach accurately ranking their team. So what I’ll be doing in this email is giving you some information and data that will allow you to accurately rank your team to the best of your ability.
Below, we’ve created a Registration Checklist.
http://www.cnrbasketball.org/registration-checklist/
On this checklist, it shows you the steps in registering- starting with researching your ranking. This is where you’ll be able to find the past four leagues we’ve had (from the 2017-18 Winter League thru the 2018 Fall League). On this link, you can access the schedules/results as well as seeing a breakdown of what teams ranked themselves.
My challenge to those of you that have played in past leagues is this:
– Print out your team’s past schedule
– Look at the rankings of the teams you played and write those down
– Analyze the data
So when analyzing the data, here are the things you want to think about:
– If you had a nearly undefeated record with many lopsided games- and those games were against teams of similar ranking to you, it means you probably under-ranked yourself. On the otherhand, if you are getting pounded by teams of similar ranking, it means you may have over-ranked yourself.
– If you have a blow-out (one way or the other) against a team of a similar ranking, click on that team’s schedule to see how their overall results are. Let’s say that team beat you by 30. If you click on that schedule and they are beating everyone by 30, then it means they probably under-ranked themself
Understanding what a 1 ranking is:
The biggest ranking to decipher is a 1 ranking. If you’re ranking yourself a 1, it means you have a group of kids who are extremely below average, who only play basketball in the winter, and who are playing at a low-rec level. A good example of a 1 ranked team would be a feeder organization who is entering three 6th grade boys’ teams in the league who may take the top 10 to put on a “A” team and the next 10 to put on a “B” team- and then have nine kids leftover. This could be an example of a 1.
What would be a perfect schedule:
A perfect schedule would be a team who have a .500 record with most games decided by 10 points or less.
Why it is important to take the time to go through this process right now:
Putting together our winter league schedule takes around two months. Every single game is hand-scheduled as we try to work around all of the parameters necessary. A team who registers by October 1 is going to have a much better schedule than the team who registers in late October as there are more options to schedule them. It is important to give an accurate ranking as once the league starts, we are limited in what we can do to adjust a schedule. Many teams plan their other winter activities around the winter league schedule- so it’s not in their best interest to move out of a slot. So please take the time to go through the process to accurately rank your team.
If you are a brand new team to our league, how should you go about ranking yourself:
The first thing I’d do is see if you know of anyone that has played in our league where you might know some of those kids. I’d research their team and try to make a judgement off of their results/ ranking. From there, I’d look at the Team Ranking sheet we have and see if that helps you with a judgement:
http://www.cnrbasketball.org/team-ranking/
If you still don’t know, just email us your situation and we’ll give you our thoughts.
Fall League and Spring League- it seems like we play teams with a bigger variety of rankings:
Yes- this is definitely the case, and the reason is pretty simple. In the winter, we’ll have around 900 teams in the league. For many of our grade levels, that means we’ll have over 50 teams in a division- some up to 70 teams. In the fall and spring, we have average around 250 teams. That means are divisions for far less. When trying to accomodate for everyone’s conflicts and to get teams the amount of games they requested, the range of teams you’ll play in those seasons will definitely be greater than the winter. So point being- don’t over-think things in the fall when trying to account for your team’s winter ranking.
Registration Page- One Stop Shop for Everything
Below is a link where you can find all of our leagues/tournaments we have- and you can directly register from that page:
http://www.cnrbasketball.org/spring-cnr-registration/
One main thing on this page is that we have added a new tournament- the CNR January Bash– which will be held on January 12-13. If you plan on playing in this tournament but don’t want to play league games on that weekend, make sure you blackout those dates.
Should I register my team if I don’t know my conflicts?
No- don’t register your team if you don’t know your conflicts. Don’t put down in the conflict section “will let you know later”. If you do that, we’re just going to delete the entry. Figure out your conflicts first- then you can register.
CNR Frequently Asked Questions Link
Here’s a great link below that will answer many questions you might have in the league:
http://www.cnrbasketball.org/frequently-asked-questions-2/
Deadlines to Register
Final section involves a common question we get- which is “when is the deadline to register”. With our winter league, you’ll want to register as close to October 1 as possible. That isn’t the deadline- but it’s when we start scheduling. One we start, we don’t go backwards. We can still take teams up through mid-November. However, at that point, your schedule isn’t going to be as good as one who registered around October 1.
For all tournaments, we start scheduling two weeks before the event. So for example, the CNR Preseason Tournament (Nov 17-18), we’ll start scheduling it on November 3. However, unlike the league- which has unlimited space for teams, we run out of space in our tournaments and will have to turn away teams. So I wouldn’t recommend you wait until November 3rd to register.