For the 2018 UK National Team Racing Championships the race committee decided to run a trial to determine if it was possible to use competitor crowd sourcing to establish a ranking for seeding ahead of the event. Each team was provided details of all three helms and then invited to submit who they believed were the top 12 teams. Given the event was curtailed prematurely, it is not possible to rank all the teams in order of their actual performance and so there is no good data to compare to. Therefore, it is not possible to draw any firm conclusions about the usefulness of this data. However, we have shared the information here for interest. Everyone is welcome to analyse the data and propose a potential seeding solution which could be used at future events. Some of our observations:

• There was a high response rate, with 19 out of 24 teams responding.
• The majority of teams provided their top 12, but a few did not feel they knew the teams ranked 8-12 well enough to be able to provide a ranking.
• As shown in the table below, the teams who the community thought were the better teams (labelled in the table as crowd sourced gold teams) produced rankings which were more consistent with the consensus. Hence a future seeding process could be to find out who everyone thinks are the top 8 and then base the seeding on the opinions of those top 8.
• Despite the helm data being sent to competitors, there was some confusion about who was who. This was particularly pronounced for the team representing Oxford and Cambridge Sailing Society - who had sailed as Royal Thames Blue for the previous 2 seasons. They were consistently ranked 2nd or 3rd by the higher ranked teams, but did not even feature in the top 12 of some of the lower ranked teams.
• Whilst not shown here, teams tended to overstate their own ability. 10 teams ranked themselves higher than they were ranked by their competitors but only 2 teams ranked themselves lower. (2 teams were spot on and 5 teams did not include themselves in the ranking).

Please do get in touch by emailing results@ksail.co.uk with any comments, feedback or proposals for changes in the future. The table below provides the submitted results:

Note: The crowd sourcing seeding was calculated by awarding 12 points to whichever team was ranked 1st, 11 points to 2nd etc. The total points were then summed and the teams ranked on this basis.