SailMichigan Midwest College Sailing Fall 2014 Rankings

Here are the SailMichigan collegiate rankings for Fall 2014. As a reminder these are not sanctioned by the ICSA or MCSA but are generated to engage discussion and excellence in Midwest collegiate sailing. Although "unofficial", these rankings and the process used, should be attributed to SailMichigan if reported elsewhere.

The separate national collegiate rankings produced by Sailing World magazine are the result of a coach's poll which inherently places Midwest teams at a disadvantage. Teams from smaller Midwest colleges in particular, may not have professional coaches and are likely to be club-status teams. As a consequence, the voices for these teams are absent. SailMichigan rankings are performance based and reflect competition in the Midwest specifically.

The following was considered for the rankings:

1. Race results from 13 Midwest regattas were considered (2 promotional, 4 Interconference, and 7 In-conference).
2. Race results were taken directly from the Inter-Collegate Sailing Association website (official results). Regattas not reported through this source were not considered.
3. Single-sex regattas (Men only, Women only) were not considered.
4. Collegiate teams must have competed in at least 3 regattas to be considered. The average attendance for competing colleges in Fall 2014 was 3.2 regattas/college.
5. Among those that competed in more that 3 regattas, the best 3 performances were considered
6. Individual regatta performance was determined by the highest place a college team finished divided by the square of the total number of colleges (not teams) participating in that regatta. This gives more weight to teams placing well in large competitive regattas and does not bias for those colleges competing with more than one boat/team in a given regatta.

Trends in the rankings

As is consistent with previous years, collegiate performance can be seen as stratifying into tiers. Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota consistently appear in the highest tier and generally represent the most competitive programs. Wisconsin, in particular, occasionally shows up in the Sailing World national rankings. In this particular season, Michigan Tech, Western Michigan, Michigan State and Northwestern are appearing in tier 2. Ohio State and University of Illinois - Chicago cluster together with the remaining programs filling out the list. Of note, Hope College is demonstrating good effort clustering well among much larger schools.

Results for Fall 2014

Rank	School	Score
1	University of Michigan	3.2
2	University of Wisconsin	6.3
3	University of Minnesota	9.1
4	Michigan Technological University	10.3
5	Western Michigan University	10.9
6	Northwestern University	11.2
7	Michigan State University	11.6
8	Ohio State University	15.8
9	University of Illinois - Chicago	16.7
10	University of Notre Dame	18.3
11	Hope College	18.7
12	University of Illinois	18.9
13	Miami University	19.2
14	Grand Valley State University	19.6
15	Denison University	20.3
16	Washington University	23.7
17	Northern Michigan University	25.4
18	Marquette University	25.8
19	University of Chicago	33.7