New ZDL/Duathlon participant. I was hoping to discuss and understand the team scoring, and why it’s done the way it is. The way it works now, all members of a team are averaged; it looks like in past seasons there were variations (dropped the lowest/highest, etc.). I’m guessing there was some reasoning behind this.
Personally, I’m not a huge fan of simply averaging every team member. My team happens to have a lot of great runners, while I’m brand new. Seemed like a cool thing for me to try. I want to participate however I don’t want to pull my team’s average down, so I’m disincentivized from participating. (To be clear, my team wants me to participate anyway – when I say I’m disincentivized, I mean that I am aware that my results will mean a lower score for the team.)
And while I realize this is for fun and recreational, I also think it’s normal to have a team first mentality and want to compete as effectively as possible. If you race in ZRL, WTRL TTTs, TT Weekly, etc., there’s really no direct penalty for an individual poor performance. In ZRL, a poor ride might not get many points, but it’s not any worse than having an unused slot. In TTTs, it’s typically the first 4 that finish that count, so it doesn’t matter if some get dropped along the way and that is part of the strategy. Etc.
Is there are particular reason a simple method like, “top 3 (or top n)” results aren’t used? No system is perfect I realize, but this event type is the only one I can think of where individual participation can be detrimental to team standings (and potentially even abused). Ultimately, this scoring encourages teams to limit participation to their anticipated top 3 … why not just do it for them to encourage more participation?