This is a question that comes up every now and then in email to the USCF.
Suppose a tournament has an non-rated section. Players (or more likely their parents) may not be fully aware that the section was non-rated, so they go to look up the new rating on MSA and like McCavity in Cats, it isn’t there!
Would there be any benefits to permitting TDs to include non-rated sections in MSA? Obviously we’d have to make sure the crosstable clearly indicates the section was not USCF rated, and there would probably still have to be a charge for handling those games.
I think Mark Nibbelin gets it right when he simply makes those sections JTPs. It seems like the TDs, etc. have a lot of the same hoops to jump through either way (unrated or JTP), so why not give the kids a taste of rated tournament chess?
There is one organizer I work with that has rated primary, elementary, junior high and high school sections and then a non-rated section for anybody, including adults. I usually don’t bother submitting the non-rated section (if I forget to delete it from the upload file then I mark it as non-rated), and it wouldn’t qualify for JTP.
You could merely list the non-rated sections with the tournament with no game detail but, since most players find tournament by looking at their history, that wouldn’t help the situation that much. If you want the detail games then the TD will have to make sure that every player has an ID (many of which would be non-members).
Doing this would allow some organizations like the Illinois High School Association to list tournament results in MSA without violating their by-law that prohibits requiring membership in a non-school organization before students can play for their school. Since there is a sunset on how long the detail records remain on the Illinois Coaches’ website, having them in MSA will allow a longer historical lookup. The startup at the beginning of the school year would be quite tedious, but by the end of the year most of the USCF IDs would be in the player file that the various organizers and TDs use, so it wouldn’t be that bad then.
Yes, sorry, I meant ‘non-rated’ sections. I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night, obviously. :sigh:
I’ve corrected my earlier post and the topic header.
BTW, JTP events only can be rated if they qualify, ie, if they are primary events (K-3 or younger) or in-school K-12 events being run by the scholastic affiliate for that school and only for the students of that one school.
Perhaps a reasonable compromise would be to list the non-rated section by event name, but with no crosstable or player names, and provide a link (if supplied by the organizer) to a state (or other) website where the crosstable could be found.