We’ve very much enjoyed getting the site up and running over the past 6-8 months. We’ve received lots of feedback from the North Carolina baseball community and we hope we’ve been able to provide a useful resource for the parents, coaches, and players that visit the site. One of the most enjoyable features and tasks has been to formulate rankings for each age group each week. We’ve learned that teams, coaches, players, and parents are very interested in these rankings and really do look to them to see not only where their own team stands, but also where there opponents rank.
While we feel we’ve been able to put together rankings that approximate the competition amongst the different age groups, we realize that there are many people around the state who have more intimate knowledge about some of the teams we’ve ranked (or haven’t ranked) than we do. One idea we’ve been debating is trying to formulate a ranking system that utilizes more opinions than just our own or of those within our circle whom we speak with. The idea that seems most appealing to us is a coaches poll.
They way we envision this would be as follows: after each weekend’s games, a select number of coaches from a variety of geographic locations around the state would submit their own rankings to us. We could keep these anonymous. We would then utilize those rankings to formulate a “composite” coaches’ ranking for each age group. This is appealing to us because it utilizes the opinion of others beyond our own, and may provide some insights into teams we are not as familiar with. The downsides are that it because much more complicated to put together the rankings, and its not yet clear to us that coaches would 1) want to participate, 2) which coaches/organizations we should invite to participate, and 3) how many coaches to involve at each age group.
We want your opinion on this. Would you, as a reader, appreciate seeing a “coaches” poll? If you are a coach, would this be something your are interested in participating in? Feel free to comment on this post, message us on twitter, post in the forums on the site, or email us directly to let us know your thoughts.