Michigan Cup Committee Meeting Scheduled for August 6

Fri, Jul  7, 2006 - By Mike Muha

The Michigan Cup Committee will meet on Sunday August 6 at Bob Frye's house on Higgins Lake to discuss changes to the Michigan Cup 2007 ski season. The agend includes a presentation by the Noque Committee on whether to score the Noque as a classic marathon.

The team captain or his/her designate serves as a representative on the Michigan Cup Committee to help determine rules, race schedule, promotion of the Michigan Cup, and to consider any other Michigan Cup business. Generally, the committee meets once in August to discuss the upcoming season. As needed, members of the committee communicate by e-mail on specific topics.

Currently, Curt Peterson, Mike Muha, Randy Bladel, Jim Monroe, and Denny Paull serve on a committee to make a recommendation as to how to score of the Noquemanon Ski Marathon in the Michigan Cup.  Curt started a lively discussion on the NordicSkiRacer.com website forum last year; this committe is a follow up to that discussion.

As history, the Noquemanon was added to the Michigan Cup schedule at the suggestion of Bob Vander Kopple at the Michigan Cup meeting last year, on a split vote 3-2. The main concern was that it was too far away for many skiers. There were a fair number of Mi Cup skiers at the race this past year - it increased by about 25 skiers. 
 
The Noque was scored like the other two marathon races in the Michigan Cup - as a freestyle race - which means that the classic skiers times are just added into the freestyle results, since classic is a freestyle technique. The long race starts at 200 points and the short race starts at 150 points. This was originally done as a way to include the short races in the scoring of the marathon race and still have a functioning race series (one winner per day of racing). 
 
At the meeting it was suggested that the Noquemanon count for classic points only, but this was voted down 4-1. The reasoning was that the vast majority of Michigan Cup skiers doing the race do it freestyle. Another point was that we only decided to score Michigan Cup skiers in this race, which allowed an easier job of scoring. We normally throw out any racer not from Michigan or on a Michigan Cup roster. In this case, given the large number of Yoopers that do the race, it would have made for a skewed points distribution for this race as many Yoopers don't come down for the Mi Cup races. 
 
Scoring was a problematic as we could not get sortable results and had to go through them by hand. We missed quite a few and Ken Dawson (Michigan Cup Scorer) had to answer lots of questions and rework the results several times. This can most likely be worked out with preplanning but I think we will always be a secondary thought to the Noque Committee and get lost in the confusion of race week.
 
The committee's charter is to come up with a recommendation for the Michigan Cup Committee meeting on the scoring of the Noquemanon, either as a freestyle race or as a classic race. The recommendation is to include a justification, and reference the distribution of skiers doing the race, freestyle and classic. 
 
The recommendation will be discussed and voted upon at the Michigan Cup Committee meeting.