"Best" of Badminton BC Awards? 🤔

A re-analysis and alternative "Best of BC" award list based on data

The “Best of BC” awards happened this weekend for Badminton BC (BBC), prior to their annual general meeting (AGM). Awards were given and people were recognized. I’d like to acknowledge everyone involved for their efforts. There will always be bias in decision making, but a respectable goal is to be as objective as possible. Given my re-analysis, I don’t want to minimize the efforts of those who worked on the 2024 Badminton BC awards. However, it should also be fair to say the following:

Giving awards to the wrong people can give them a false sense of accomplishment.

Not giving awards to those that should have earned it, minimize their efforts AND accomplishments.

The selection process for award winners should be standardized with clear criteria. This would minimize bias, as the performance metrics would be established before the calculations. Based on a first glance of the current BBC awards list, it appears that different methods were used and award winners were not consistently selected in certain categories.

This isn’t an accusation of intentional favouritism or bias toward specific players or clubs. The more likely explanation is an underestimation of the time and effort required to properly assess BC's best players, factoring in results from various levels of competition. Even for me, it took significant effort to gather the data, do a proper analysis, and write about these results.

It's important to be clear that this analysis primarily focuses on U15 to U19 junior results, with a brief commentary on senior competition results. A Jupyter notebook of the full analysis is on my GitHub, but the dataset is not included for personal reasons. Data is publicly available on TournamentSoftware.

I will keep things more simple here for a general audience.

Selection Criteria

There are a few things that have to be decided on for the awards:

• Which ranking points are to be used?

• Which tournaments count toward results?

• How do we manage athletes that compete in higher age categories?

• How do we manage doubles teams? For example, do we award them individually, or as a team?

There are other things that we must also establish:

• I cannot comment on U11 results, as most of my data did not include anything from that.

• I cannot comment on Masters results, because their rankings are done differently.

• Further analysis is likely needed for U13, as the mixture of results can be difficult. There are a few tournaments with U13, but there were no official ranking points from Badminton Canada.

• U23 had minimal tournaments and didn’t even have certain event disciplines, so let’s skip this one.

Let’s summarize our selection criteria:

• We will use Badminton Canada’s ranking points from the previous season, which gives bonuses to players who compete up in age category.

• Tournament included will be anything included on the Badminton Canada ranking list. This includes National Championships, National Elites, Provincial Championships, and Provincial ‘A’ Series tournaments. ‘B’ tournaments will not be included.

• We will look at doubles players individually, but we can include the top two players for each doubles discipline. For mixed doubles (XD), we will include the top male and female athletes as a potential pair.

• Although rankings are based on the best four results, the analysis suggests it might be more accurate to consider the top five results for awards. A more detailed explanation can be found in the Jupyter notebook.

Badminton BC’s Award Winners

Reverse engineer the selection criteria for award winners.

When I first saw the list, I had a feeling that the results were largely based on provincial results. As someone who had previously worked as the high performance coordinator and responsible for selecting the 2023 award winners, I left BBC prior to selecting the 2024 award winners. That’s a story for another time!

The first thing I did was to look at the 2024 provincial champions. Given that Badminton BC failed to host provincials in time for ranking points for U11-U17, players that pursued ranking points for junior nationals mostly competed at the U19 Provincial Championships.

Next, I checked the Badminton BC junior ranking list, and once again, it seemed that many award results came from here. However, there are some major issues with this ranking list:

• National results are missing from this ranking list (see here).

• Players can have separate rankings if they play in different age groups. For example, if a player plays a tournament U17 and another U19, and get 1000 points each, it means they have two separate rankings of 1000 points each, instead of a single ranking with 2000 points.

Lastly, I reviewed the Badminton Canada junior ranking list. One problem was that the ranking point system was adjusted in early September, making the old ranking lists unavailable (technically, they still exist, but Badminton Canada has hidden access on their dropdown for ranking week). However, competition results are still available for previous tournaments. It’s unclear how much influence this ranking list had on the awards for now, but it seems provincial results played a larger role.

Results of the Re-Analysis

Based on the 2023-2024 Badminton Canada ranking point system

Here’s a heatmap of the top three players in each junior age category from my re-analysis. The players are ranked based on their top five competition results across all eligible tournaments. We can see that the best players also tend to play the most tournaments.

This is a very different list than what BBC produced. While the awards recognized deserving athletes, there were several significant oversights in their selection process. In particular, some athletes who demonstrated outstanding achievements throughout the season were not acknowledged. Given their results, these athletes should have been recognized:

• (U15 BS) Robert XU:

  • U15 BS junior national semi-finalist

  • Finals for six different national Junior Elites

  • Incorrectly recognized for U17 BS by BBC.

• (U15 BD) Kevin ZHOU/Robert XU:

  • U15 BD junior national champions

  • Qualified for Pan Am Juniors in U15 BD.

  • Incorrectly recognized for U17 BD by BBC.

• (U15 XD) Kevin ZHOU/Olivia GAO:

  • Finalists in U15 XD at the Junior National Championships

  • Four other national Junior Elite finals

  • Incorrectly recognized for U17 XD by BBC.

• (U17 BS) Nathan LEE:

  • U17 BS junior national semi-finalist

  • Finals for 4 other national Junior Elites

  • Qualified for Pan Am Juniors in U17 BS

  • With Robert given the U17 BS award, Nathan’s accomplishments were largely unrecognized.

• (U17 BD) Nathan LEE/Harry NG:

  • U17 BD junior national finalists

  • Ontario Junior Elite U17 BD champions

  • With Robert/Kevin given the U17 BD awards, Nathan and Harry’s accomplishments were largely unrecognized.

• (U19 XD) Lyem FEDORETZ/Thalia SE (or Ethan YEN/Breanne CHAN)

  • Based on overall national results as individuals (different partners outside of BC), Lyem and Thalia should get the award.

  • However, Ethan and Breanne could be contenders as they were the U19 provincial champions and competed as a team. This was one of the reasons why a national award and provincial award may be beneficial in these cases, so that more athletes can be recognized.

• (U17 GS) Abbie LEUNG:

  • This is probably the most significant oversight of the BBC awards. Abbie is technically only U15, but has been competing in U17 nationally, and U19 provincially. She even won the U19 GS Provincial Championships!

  • However, this creates a problem in which age category she should receive an award (if she got one 😥). Given that she didn’t compete in U15 at all, I would recommend the U17 GS award.

These aren’t the only athletes who missed out on awards, so I encourage you to review the results to see who else might have been overlooked.

What if we used the new rankings?

The new BCAN ranking system reduced points for national championships, added a new tournament grade (Junior Super Series), and stopped awarding bonuses to athletes who competed in higher age categories. With a little bit of code, we can make those adjustments and create a new heatmap.

Similar, but slightly different!

As points across age categories are now the same, we would expect the distribution of points to be closer together. However, the heatmap highlights players who stand out, many of whom were mentioned earlier.

We can also start to see some names included on the BBC award list, which means that they may have consulted the new BCAN ranking list, as this heatmap is based on the new points. However, there should be some concern when they intend to be “merit-based” for their new competition regulations, but failed to identify the best players based on meritocracy for their awards. 🤔

What about Senior tournaments?

What senior tournaments? 💀 From the award list, we can see that they simply gave the awards to the 2024 provincial champions. There are a few problems with that because it disregards all the results from other tournaments. Some of those tournaments might be considered more prestigious… like the 2024 Senior National Championships, which was hosted in BC the first time in 10 years. I know because I competed in that one too. 🙃

The greatest oversight in the senior awards is the failure to recognize Duncan YAO, who not only won the 2024 Senior Canadian National Championships, but also the 2023-2024 BC Senior Elite.

Some people might not understand the importance of national results for provincial awards. It’s simple, who do you represent when you compete nationally?

For example, if you’re competing at World Championships or the Olympics, who do you represent? Your country (technically there’s continental representation, but let’s assume you represent your country when you compete internationally).

If we go down a level, who do you represent when you compete nationally? Your province. This is why national results matter. They reflect the athletes who best represent your province at this level.

Finally, who do you represent at the provincial level? It’s likely your city, region, or club. Everyone at a provincial championship is already from the same province, so focusing solely on provincial results creates redundancy. To truly recognize the athletes who can best represent your province, national results should be included in the selection process.

Given performance results, I happened to do pretty well in mixed doubles this year too:

• won the 2023-2024 BC Senior Elite Series

• bronze at the 2024 Senior National Championships

• won the 2024 Jack Underhill (BC Senior A Series)

Awards are nice, but I wouldn’t trade it for the accomplishments of this season. 😌

Thank you, Thalia and Jacqueline! 🤩

I don’t need the recognition because my career is long over, but what about those that should have been recognized? The large variation in the awards list is concerning, and although I’m not pointing fingers, how can we be confident that the process will be improved in the future?

Unless there may be a bias… what if we took another look at our list?

Added players’ clubs

Hmmm… 🤔

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