If you are like me you'd like to be able to take your wife to interesting places, like Laragne, France, which makes her happy, while you get a chance to fly in the World Championships, which makes me happy. You might ask yourself, if you have such a wife and such a desire to please her, what can you do to get on the US national team, so that you too could be invited to the World Championships. Remember the 2011 World Championships are in Seguilo, Italy, and even if it isn't quite as nice of Provencal France, it is a lot nicer than Zapata.

BTW, the pre-Worlds in Italy are open on a first come first serve basis so you don't have to be on the US National Team to go there and fly in a very high level competition, and practice up for the Worlds.

Unlike in some other countries membership on the US National team is determined completely by merit and is objective. There are no subjective components to it and it is completely formula driven.

You get on the team by having at the end of the year the highest composite score of your best four finishes over the last four years. You can only count your top two scores from the previous year and you can only count two foreign competition total. This skews the ranking toward the latest competitions and toward domestic competitions (so you might argue that it might not choose the best pilot).

It requires that you go to at least four USHPA (or CIVL) sanctioned competitions over a two year period, i.e. two meets a year. You may not be able to go to two years a year, so you won't be able to make the team. You may be a very very good pilot (say Paris Williams) and only able to go to one competition over a two year period, but our current formula won't allow you to make the US National team.

If you can afford the time and money that it takes to go to two competitions a year (or four in one year) then you have an opportunity to compete for the US National team. But, it takes more than that. It requires you to actually do relatively well at the competitions, and it requires (somewhat - we'll see what that means in a minute) that you compete against other skilled cross country racing pilots and do well against them. Attendance doesn't give you a free pass to the team.

Now, in yet another aspect of the National Team Selection System (NTSS), not all meets are equally valuable when it comes to getting ranking points (NTSS points). The value of meets depends on who comes. The pilots that are ranked in the top ten bring 45 points each to the meet, those ranked 11 to 20 bring 30 point each, and so on. The formula has a few wrinkles but essentially a meet can be worth up to 600 points (660 for the winner who gets a 10 percent bonus) which after all is an arbitrary value but it is the relative value of the meets that counts.

The NTSS values meets by their "quality" in terms of the NTSS ranking of the pilots who show up. The more "high quality" highly ranked pilots who show up the the higher the value of the meet and the more it is worth to the pilots who fly there and do well. You might notice that this is a self referencing system, you have to have points in order to bring points. So when you go to a competition for the first time (and the first year) you are not bringing any points to up the value of the meet no matter how good a pilot you are. The system has a bit of lag time in it (about one year).

But the value of some meets is not determined just by the points that the NTSS ranked pilots bring to them. US based meets that are USHPA sanctioned are given a minimum of 300 points, no matter who shows up. This is a substitutive for the "warm body" value of the meet and was put in place to encourage pilots to go to the smaller competitions (and hopefully make them larger). In this way pilots new to competition don't have to bring points to make the competition worthwhile. This applied very significantly to the 2009 King Mountain co-Nationals, which would have been worth very little without the 300 points.

As a hang gliding competition is a combination of skill and a small bit of luck (there may not be a consensus as to the relative value of these components) it is of some value (maybe a lot) to go to more than four competitions over a two year period. In fact, the more the better. If you have one or two or more competitions where you do poorly, then having four good ones (where you did well, and where the points are high) definitely increases your odds of being highly ranked and perhaps on the US National team.

As not all pilots have an equal chance of attending a lot of competitions, the ones who attend more competitions (and are competent enough to do well at least now and then) have a better chance than those who only attend four (or less) competitions of making the US National team. So both luck (keeping playing the game) and skill (do well enough in at least some of the competitions) can be involved in making the US National team. Of course, if you are good enough, you can do well in just four competitions and make the team.

Pilots who fly in foreign competitions have the opportunity to fly in very valuable competitions, worth up to 600 points, because foreign pilots that are highly ranked (on the WPRS) in the World also bring lots of points to the meet. Of course, the problem is that they also bring their flying and competition skills so to do well you have to bring your skills also.

Your NTSS ranking points are determined by how well you score in a competition compared to the winner (unless, of course, you are the winner). For example, say you score 4000 points during the competition and the winner has 5000 points and the meet is worth 600 points. Then you get 4000/5000*600 = 480 NTSS points and the winner gets 660 NTSS points.

We'll get back to some of these aspects in a minute, but let's first look at how the current US National Team members made the team. You can check it out here. Here is my accounting as best I can tell (as it is missing from the USHPA web site):

Jeff O'Brien: twelfth at 2008 Santa Cruz Flats (476), tenth at the 2008 pre-Worlds in Laragne, France (480), sixteenth at 2007 Forbes Flatlands (501), fourth at 2008 Big Spring Internationals (452)

Total = 1909. Attended nine meets, three outside the US (two counted).

Dustin Martin: fourth at 2008 Santa Cruz Flats (520), second at 2008 Big Spring Internationals (461), twenty fifth at the 2007 Flytec Championship (460), first at the 2008 East Coast Championship (329)

Total = 1770. Attended six meets that counted for NTSS points, all in the US. (Flew in Brazil, but those meets weren't counted for complex reasons.) He flew six of the eight meets in the US.

Davis Straub: sixteenth at 2008 Forbes Flatlands (463), fifth 2008 Big Spring Internationals (376), eleventh 2007 US Nationals (262), twenty third 2007 Forbes Flatlands (442).

Total = 1543. Attended seventeen meets, eight outside the US (two counted). Many of the meets were small meets with few NTSS points, so they wouldn't have counted no matter how well I did in the meet. I just like to go to competitions.

Jeff Shapiro: thirteenth at 2008 Santa Cruz Flats (444), twenty fourth at the 2008 Forbes Flatlands (406), forty eighth at 2008 pre-Worlds (326), seventh at the 2008 Big Spring Internationals (352)

Total = 1528. Attended eight meets, four outside the US (two counted).

Zac Majors: seventeenth at the 2008 Santa Cruz Flats (400), sixth at the 2008 Big Spring Internationals (374), thirty fourth at the 2007 Flytec Championships (391), first at the 2008 US Nationals (330)

Total = 1495. Attended eight meets, two outside the US (didn't count).

Glen Volk: eleventh at the 2008 Santa Cruz Flats (477), third at the 2008 Big Spring Internationals (459), twenty eighth at the 2007 Flytec Championships (436)

Total = 1372. Attended three meets, all in the US. Without a fourth meet, he had little chance to get among the top five. Usually the top six pilots represent a country, but this year only five were allowed to attend the Worlds in Laragne.

Top five finishes in their 2007 and 2008 meets:

Jeff O'Brien: five

Dustin Martin: five

Davis Straub: two

Jeff Shapiro: none

Zac Majors: two

Glen Volk: one.

The primary purpose of the NTSS is to choose the strongest US National team. You'll notice that it has a few restrictions that are counter to the purpose. It doesn't let the pilots count all of their foreign competitions (it use to). Foreign competitions are often against the best foreign pilots (and their meet quality determined that), and pilots who do well against foreign pilots would be a natural choice for the US National team that goes to compete against these same pilots in the Worlds.

It also has a warm body count for US meets (the 300 point minimum) that doesn't account for the quality of the pilots that you are competing against.

These two provisions were put into the USHPA Competition Rulebook by yours truly in an effort to use the NTSS as a way to encourage more participation in competition and make it "fairer" to US pilots who couldn't travel abroad. The NTSS is something that I inherited as the USHPA Competition Committee Chairman, but it is something that I made a few small modifications to to my personal disadvantage.

So the question on your mind might be, is this the best system for choosing a US National team? Maybe, maybe not. Let's say you've got to choose a team of six pilots objectively, so we are talking about a new formula here. What would that formula be?

Would it count just one meet over two years? Would it look at just the highest scorers (in the top five maybe)? Would it compare the "top" pilots against each other in the meets that they both attend? Would it use only the top two (or one) meet in the US each year?

I'm sure that you could come up with some formulas.

Who do you think should be on the US National team that goes to the Worlds in 2011 and how should they make it on to the team (objectively)?