Faqs 

How are National Championship Ranking Points Calculated?

For the USA SUP National Championships (at least 2023 & 2024), we used a web based software application called Liveheats. This software offers us a number of advantages as we evolve our sport towards 3 day events and specifically the 3 disciplines (Sprint, Tech and Distance) of which Sprint and Tech in particular have heats and progressions, something we often see in other mainstream sports today.

Liveheats then keeps track of each athlete as they progress through heats to finals, and ultimately completion of the competition. They then add up points awarded for placings in each discipline to provide a total per division, for example '200M Sprints Grand Masters Female'

So for the Nationals we simply took the Liveheats results, totaled them across the 3 disciplines we had said counted toward "Overall" champions and then displayed on the page you see, while adding a little extra info like region.  

Where did you get all the results from? 

Other than Nationals, we gather the results from the data each of the known Race Registrars, and other Event Timing companies, has made publicly available. We continue to work toward identifying other new registrars and event timing companies which may also have results we are not currently aware of. Known registrars: PaddleGuru, Webscorer, and Run Sign Up.

Why didn’t my race result count in the overall ranking?

There are a few reasons why your result was not counted:

• The results for the race you attended were not made publically available by one of the known Race Registrars or Event Timing companies.

• You 'did not start' (DNS), 'did not finish' (DNF) or were 'disqualified' (DQ).

• The race you participated in did not collect results. For example there were 98 events listed in Paddleguru alone that had "No Results Available" or "These results are Private", and so were not available for ranking purposes.

• We made a mistake! 
  
  

Please let us know if we made a mistake by emailing us at rankings@usasup.org or adding a comment in the Members' Rankings Forum on our website, and we'd be happy to look at where we went wrong and update results as appropriate.  We will apply our learnings to future ranking efforts.

Why do you have a ranking for USA SUP (members) and a ranking for USA SUP (members and non-members)?

We would love for everyone to be an USA SUP member! Please help us support our organization because it is a grassroots non-profit built by people who are passionate about the sport. We are providing a ranking for both members and overall of those in the community because we promised from the beginning that we would do so. 

As we announce the 2022 results, we are looking forward to more members to join USA SUP. At some point in the future, when we have a critical mass of most paddlers as part of USA SUP, we will announce ranking for members only.

How do you calculate the points for each race?

The first step is to gather all race results from known Race Registrars and Event Timing companies.

As many of our SUP paddle events are combined with other watercraft, ie OCs, Surfskis etc, counting all these events, including one off events like the ICF World Cup in Oklahoma City (OKC), we ended up analyzing approx 10,000 individual race results that we were able to find. 

From these we looked for the word ‘SUP’ in the Category field of the race results to narrow down the results to those specific to our watercraft. 

Next we, on a per gender basis,  gathered all of the SUP race results where the SUP paddler completed the race course, ie the paddler was not ‘DNS’ / ‘DNF’ / ‘DQ’, to get a number of “total SUP finishers”.

This got us down to 3830 individual race results. 

We then, again on a per gender basis, determine an individual paddlers finish position within the total number of finishers and award “Overall Ranking Points” for that individual race.

To get Total Ranking Points  for each paddler, we take the total of the paddler’s top 5 individual race results. Note that some paddlers did not have a top 5, but rather something less than 5 race results that we ranked.

This gets us to our final count of 3314 individual ranking results used to display the results you see for each of your races and how many points you received from the race.

For each race, points are calculated based on the overall number of people in the division. For example, if there are 50 people in the division, the top 1 paddler gets 50 points; the last paddler gets 1 point. 

We understand that with this method, points are favored for those who attend races that have a large number of people (e.g. Hanohano Ocean Challenge), but because we do not have a consensus within USA SUP or with the paddling community on how to weigh more challenging races with a small number of professionals or advanced amateurs (e.g. OKC, USA Surfing), we elected to keep things simple for 2022. We welcome comments and suggestions for future ranking results!

For now, due the disparity of data from different races, we use gender as the only division. We are actively working with race organizers to make sure data in future races are more congruent so we can publish more nuanced ranking based on age categories, type of race (distance vs technical), and other divisions as we grow the organization.

How do you break ties if I have the same overall points as someone else?

We only applied tie breakers manually for the top ten paddlers list as we have not implemented a way to tie break all results automatically. 

If you have the same overall points as another paddler, you will rank higher if your highest scoring race is higher than the other paddler. If both of your highest ranked races have the same number of points, we will compare the next highest ranked races and tie break based on that one. We will keep going until we find a tie breaker race.

What do the colors mean?

The colors reference the Seven USA SUP Regions. While we had originally hoped to have ALL paddlers listed by Regions, we didn't have enough information, to be able to complete that goal, but we DO have addresses for our Members, so we have a secondary sort of our MEMBERS who raced in 2022 by Regions. 

Can I share the results with my community or on social media?

Absolutely! We would love for you to share your ranking with your paddling community, family and friends, the more the merrier. We look forward to building a great platform for ranked results for USA SUP!