[BD] do we need spirit prizes at all?

[IndoorsDOC]

Patrick wrote:
>> in the BULA scoring system, it is also
>> apparently spirited to "Avoid frequently calling non-obvious travels and
>> picks" - but what if it isn't obvious and so needs to be called! isn't that
>> why we sometimes make calls - because they are NOT obvious!
>>     
>
> Please read don't ignore the word "frequently". Frequently is not
> "sometimes". Have you never played a team that the moment you throw they
> call "travel" even though they are marking you hard and have no way to
> really know if you did or not. And they do that almost every throw?
> Spirited? No. The wording was carefully chosen. (disclosure: I was the
> driving force behind the new BULA/WFDF SOTG scoring system and we worked on
> it for more than a year, analyzing responses from the previous BULA system
> as well as analyzing SOTG discussions on BritDisc, ED, and rec.sport.disc,
> etc...)
>   
Sorry, Patrick, I don't agree. If someone is calling travel calls when 
my foot hasn't moved, or every time I throw, then they're cheating and 
I'll stop the game to thrash them within an inch of their lives (or 
something like that). But that's a long way from 'non-obvious'. The 
wording may have been carefully chosen, but it's still wrong.

If someone is deliberately calling crap travels, that's a far more 
serious issue than just losing one point on their spirit score. Whereas 
if they're just calling a lot of travels when my foot (in my opinion) 
has only moved a little, then that's a different thing entirely. If my 
foot moves, they can call travel. If they're doing it too much, I should 
stop moving my damned foot. :-)

It's either too serious an issue to be dealt with in this way, or it's 
an issue about how much movement of my pivot foot constitutes a travel 
that affects the game, and hence has to be settled between the players 
involved by a discussion. Either way it shouldn't be in these spirit 
rules. If it happens 'frequently' that I think it didn't affect the game 
but my marker did, then BOTH teams have failed to reach an agreement on 
what a travel ought to be.

Spirit is an ideal that we cannot usually live up to in practice. The 
word 'frequently' implies that we're allowed to make one or two crap 
travel calls in a game, and thus undermines the 'ideal' nature of 
spirit. I really, really, really don't like that wording.

(The same argument applies to picks equally - if I lose 20 centimetres 
on my guy because someone runs across me, then that could make all the 
difference. It doesn't have to be an 'obvious' pick to affect play. 
What's important in spirit is that I call it only if it affects play [or 
that I decline it if it doesn't affect play] - non-obviousness is 
utterly irrelevant. Incidentally, picks are always pretty non-obvious to 
the cutter, because they happen behind him...)

I'd be much more worried, in the spirit rules, about people's /reaction/ 
to pick and travel calls on big points. If it's a valid call, a spirited 
team shouldn't lose their rag. And like I said before, if it's /not/ a 
valid call, it's a vastly more serious issue than losing one point on a 
16 point spirit scale...

On the other hand, having said all that, I think the BULA spirit system 
is pretty good, so don't take it personally. I just don't like that one 
line.

B