RadNess unLimIted...

Explanation may come later as I have a big dirty skelf in my finger which is having a seriously annoying affect on my typing.

#####################################################
Later
We were approached to help out with a fund raising skatecomp for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. Normally these types of comps involve a fair bit of work organising music, prizes and people to help organise and judge but with this being organised by someone else, all we were doing were providing judging MCing and prize awarding.

The yellow blob in the background is actually Matt Welsh who has been kitted out in an RNLI water proof kit and helmet for some photos. Matt won his age group quite convincingly in my opinion for technical and stylistic wizardry. Flying the Fife and Stripey jersey flag for which I almost gave him bonus points in my newly developed skate comp judging system I worked out on the night.

I need to get to work, so I'll explain my new judging system a little later.

#####################################################
A Little Later

I find Skateboard competitions quite hard to judge. Skateboarding is a bit like I imagine the scoring of things like gymnastics. There is technical prowess in being able to do tricks but then there is also stylistic element where 2 people could land the same trick but one could just make it look so much better. This is usually made even harder by the fact that we generally run jam formats so we have a number of people all skating at the same time.

I have a system of point allocation dependant upon landed tricks, graded on difficulty. I'll give a 1 for a standardish trick land, 2 for something a bit bigger, higher, faster or technically more difficult. I thought I'd do a 3 as well if trick landed goes above 1 and 2. Note these numbers down and then at the end add similar points if appropriate for style, consistancy and varied use of available space. Add all the points up at the end and I then have a pecking order leaving the only problem being able to identify who everyone is to allocate points to.

I did consider allocating end of run points for Fife represention and stripey jersey apparel but I thought that was a bit unbalaced.