Rankings Changes for the 2024-25 Season
By Allen Wagner
As we are now entering the new calendar year, it's important to note that we’re already fully into the 2024-2025 adventure racing season in the U.S. as each season ends with the USARA National Championship. We've already got several races in the books for this new season and 3 Regional Qualifiers have already taken place with 3 teams having already locked in a spot for 2025 Nationals in Arkansas. But before we talk about this new current season, I thought it was important to reflect and celebrate the concluded 2023-2024 season for a minute.
This last season was the second since myself (Allen) and my good friend Aaron Linville volunteered to take on the task of computing rankings for USARA after Mark Latanzzi captained the effort for many years previously (Thanks Mark!). In just these 2 years we’ve already seen so much growth/change in U.S. adventure racing.
In the 2022-23 season we had 49 Sanctioned USARA races with 3,790 different racers competing at them. Compare that to the 2023-24 season and we were up to 72 sanctioned races (+47%) with 4,495 different racers toeing a start line across them (19%+).
This past season sanctioned races averaged 71.9 participants per race with our largest single race/distance having 218 participants. The largest # of entries (solos + teams) at a race was 114 and our largest combined event had 413 racers participating over a weekend. (Event = all race distances at a named event: 24hr + 10hr + 4hr, etc.).
My most favorite piece of data from last season was created by Aaron as a way to see how connected we all are. Using the results data he created a name-cloud where it links any racers that raced together this past season, and better than anything it demonstrates how we are truly a community. The largest connection of racers, (we’ll call it the Matt Wilson Cloud), contains 190+ different people that raced together this past season!
You can dive in and play with this fun racer-network-cloud here.
One change you may have noticed in the last season was that we updated the rankings so that it now compiles/ranks for all of the primary divisions that compete at sanctioned races. While only the 3/4-person points/rankings apply to Nationals qualification, we can now see and celebrate the competition and season champions for our 2-person teams and soloists too. So join me in celebrating all of our 2023-24 Season Points Champions:
3/4-Mixed: Strong Machine AR
3/4-Female: Women of AR
3/4-Male: Cherubini Brothers AR
2-Mixed: V360
2-Female: Adventure Girls
2-Male: OA Support
Solo Female: Jacqui Bahe
Solo Male: Drake White
Last but not least for 2023-24, congrats to our top ranked individual racers in the Individual Power Rankings. These are based on adding all points from all different races/divisions a person participated in for the season. After a full season of races, it came down to just 2 points for the top spot with our top ranked racers being:
Top Female: Alena Khilko
Top Male: Jesse Spangler
Changes to Rankings for the 2024-25 Season
So with 2023-24 in the books; let’s talk 2024-25 season and some new changes you'll see.
Whether it was out at a race, via email or social media; we have very much appreciated all the feedback from racers and Race Directors with thoughts/ideas for tweaks/improvement ideas for USARA Rankings. From both the feedback we get, but also trends observed, we vetted feasibility on some different ideas and sent a proposed list to the USARA Board for approval.
After careful consideration, the two following changes were approved and will now be implemented for the 2024-25 season's rankings. Both can pretty much be categorized as “scalability updates / fixes.” These are things just more needed now as adventure racing has grown and continues to grow and races/racers further diversify. :
1. Expanding the Points “Race Length” Grouping Structure
Not only are we seeing more adventure races in total, but we are now seeing more and more races with different lengths than before. The previously used groupings were pretty large and in some cases contained races with very different lengths and thus skill required. Example: in the old structure a 15-hour race scored the same points as a 36 hour race while a 12-hour race scored half the points of a 15-hour race. As race length diversity grows, it simply brings the need to adjust and make sure we award points more appropriately.
Change: We are adding a new grouping for mid-level length races and also some small adjustments to better group the others using more distinct skill/aspect that makes those events more “alike,” you can see the new points structure below:
2. Awarding Points By Entry Size
With the growth of adventure racing in recent years has also come a vast growth of options for racers, particularly an increase in options to race as a soloist or 2-person teams alongside 3/4-person teams. This is great for racers, but it also leaves us with a vast array of what we see in the results across a season. Some races have 30+ soloists, some don’t have any, some races have predominantly 3/4-person teams while others have less than a handful of them...
In addition to that, USARA Rankings are now directly being used for Nationals qualification for 3/4-person teams. So we’ve seen a need to balance how points are awarded when the makeup of entries at races can be so different across the year.
Example: Last season at 24-hour Regional Qualifiers, the winning 3/4-Mixed teams ended up getting anywhere from 100 points to 47 points depending on how many soloists and 2-person teams were also out there racing and doing well.
From the feedback and discussions we’ve had, it appears all adventure racers agree that we love the additional options for racers, but we also agree that racing solo vs. as a 2-person team vs. as a 3/4-person team are distinctly different experiences/challenges; so it's not entirely fair to just group them all together for points distribution. We wanted to find a way to more appropriately award points in a more “apples to apples” fashion.Change: For 2024-25, points will now be awarded on where you finish amongst like-size entries instead of overall. Technically speaking:
3/4-person teams ranked/awarded points against each other
2-person teams ranked/awarded points against each other
Soloists ranked/awarded points against each other
As you might imagine, there are always other tweaks, ideas, requests that have been (and will continue to be) discussed. We hope these two changes for this season will continue to add to the experience and fairness of rankings for adventure racing in the U.S. We are working right now to program these into the system and they will be reflected when the first set of rankings come out in the next week or so.
As always, feel free to drop a comment here or come chat with myself, Aaron, Executive Director Mike Garrison or any members of the USARA board at an event and let us know your thoughts.
Happy New Year to everyone and see you out there at the next race!