Category: Season Recap

Terry Gleeson

The Southern California I14 Fleet has 2 Season Championships trophies:  The W.D. Schock Trophy for the best SoCal boat that season and the M.O.B. Trophy for the best crew…   Why 2 trophies?  Because no one does this alone!   

These were inactive for many years but they were unearthed from the bowels of ABYC by Dr Brad and likely others about 12 years ago.   At that time, I volunteered to set up a season long scoring system to get these trophies active again, we looked at a number of scoring methods and there were lots of pros and cons of each.  After some discussion and beers, it was agreed to use a ‘high point’ scoring method… and it’s a combo of the following:

Best 51% of local regatta points + Best 51% of Championship regatta points.

To get the trophies active again, we reached back to 2011, and I scored all the seasons from 2011 on forward through 2025 using this agreed upon method. A lot of time and effort for sure.   2020 and 2021 were a bust from a season perspective and we then had to go back and look at 2019, and we just had enough data to score it. 

All that said, after a few years of YC’s misplacing the trophies, we are again so pleased that we have found the trophies, thanks to efforts from Brad, Garrett, Paul, Michael Leitch and anyone else I may have missed.

With the trophies missing the last few years, we haven’t seen these results… so we’ve done some calcs and here are all the winners for the last three seasons and the rest down below.   

Big congrats to:

So Cal Season Championship Winners 2011-2025:

2011: Paul Galvez Guillo LeondeBarra
2012: Brad Reutenik Patrick Murray
2013: Dave Hayter Trent Neighbor
2014: Brad Reutenik Patrick Murray / Jake Sorosky
2015: Terry Gleeson Evan Sjostedt
2016: Terry Gleeson Evan Sjostedt
2017: Terry Gleeson Patrick Powell / JP Barnes / Ian Furlong
2018: Brad Reutenik Garrett Brown
2019: Ted Conrads Brian Haines / Jake Sorosky
2022: Brad Reutenik Garrett Brown
2023: Garrett Brown Pinckney / Shaner 
2024: Michael Pacholski Patrick Wilkinson
2025: Brad Reutenik JP Barnes

Methodology:  

For those not familiar with this Hi Point scoring method, for each race, it counts how many boats a team beat in that race:   If it was a 5 boat race, and you got 1^st place… you get 5 points.   If you got last, you get 1 point.    If it was a 12 boat race and you were 3^rd… you get 10 points (beat 9 boats + get a point for showing up).   It values the total number of boats you beat that year across all of your races.   We use 51% of your Best Scores so it includes more boats that may not do all the events, has some leeway, but still encourages participation and highlights top racing.   

For the Season Championships we utilize a combo of each teams scores:

Best 51% of local regatta points + Best 51% of Championship regatta points.

The team with most points wins, tiebreakers go to total score (100% of scores – and yes, we’ve had to use the tiebreakers before!)

Notes: 

1. We do not include any Worlds racing in the scoring.  (skews data considerably)

2.   Data: I’ll work with James to post the spreadsheets (all 14 of them) if anyone would like to review the data or see how they scored.

FAQs:

Why High Point, why not just count how many 1sts, 2nds, etc…?

High Point system awards more value for beating more boats.   Getting 1^st in a 10 boat race essentially has twice the value of getting 1^st in a 5 boat race.  

Why 51% and how does that work? Why not 100%?    

We could certainly use a different percentage (60 or 70%?).   Using a % (such as 51%) doesn’t hurt a team for having breakdowns, or not making it to every single regatta due to work, life, vacations outside of sailing, or other commitments.   If we were to use 100%, then it becomes mostly a participation contest and may not show who was the best that season, but more of who participated the most (maybe that is a different trophy?)

Why a combo between Championship and Local regattas?   

The Championship regattas (Nationals, North Americans, PacRims) are much better attended and thus have higher scores (e.g. beating 15 boats vs just beating 5).   This sways the results quite a bit and then a team can win the season trophy by only doing the championship regattas and none of the local regattas.   The combo promotes participation and consistently good sailing.