Collegiate Gameplay Proposal
Authors: Keegan Remy-Miller and Naresh Edala
Editors: Christian Barnes and Fiona Wisehart
This proposal was originally written in November 2020. As such, all data and teams listed are from the 2019-2020 season and prior.
Introduction
Since the 2012-2013 academic year, the USQ collegiate season has remained largely unchanged. Teams in the north have consistently had to qualify for a spring Nationals in the first semester of the school year. Each year, one unlucky region has only seven weeks between Labor Day (a traditional school year start for many northern colleges) and their Regional tournament hosted on (or before) Halloween weekend. Meanwhile, many teams in the West and South do not begin to play official games until mid to late October after 7-10 weeks of practicing and playing unofficial games.
Besides the inconsistencies of the amount of practice time before qualifying for Nationals around the country, there are also massive discrepancies in quality, frequency, and availability of tournaments. Most teams will only attend two USQ-run events per year: Regionals and Nationals. The rest of each team’s season is entirely reliant on their own ability to host (and attract teams to attend) their own tournaments and the hope that other teams near them also host events. For a new team, it can be a nightmare to try to figure out where and when tournaments are happening and whether or not they will receive an invite to attend.
Recently, following the highly publicized success of the Massachusetts Quidditch Conference (MQC), more and more collegiate conferences have been forming. The majority of the leadership in these conferences are club and former college players who utilize their experience to organise gameplay schedules and provide other resources to drastically improve the collegiate season. The success of conferences, in quidditch, and other collegiate, and professional sports, is clearly evident and should be adopted as the official USQ collegiate format.
The rest of this article describes a proposal for placing every collegiate team in a quidditch conference. It includes the structure of collegiate conferences and a proposed team composition for each conference. It also explains a new season schedule that will have 3 major tournament levels, incentivises teams to keep playing throughout the whole season, and makes it easier for new teams to join the league.
Collegiate League Structure
The collegiate quidditch league will be broken into 7 conferences based on geography. Each conference will be broken into divisions with the exception of the Western Conference. The other 6 conferences have 2 divisions each. If a conference expands to 18 teams or more the conference leaders will discuss with team leaders and the League Commissioner the possibility of expanding the conference to 3 divisions. The breakdown of which teams comprise each conference and division are shown below. See Appendix A for the breakdown in map form.
Teams will play within their division during the regular season before attending conference championships and then regional championships in the spring, with the National Championship tournament occurring at the end of April.
*University of Northern Colorado doesn’t yet belong to a conference
Season Structure
The collegiate quidditch season is split into three distinct phases, the pre-season, the regular season, and the postseason.
Pre-Season August-September
The pre-season starts with the academic year and ends on September 30. It is a 4-6 week period where teams are free to recruit new players, practice, and play scrimmages or exhibition games.
Regular Season October-January
The regular season starts on October 1 and ends on January 31. During this period, teams must play at least 12 games. For any division with 7 teams or fewer, you must play everyone in your division at least twice. For any division with 8 teams or more you must play at least 6 different divisional opponents and can not play any team more than 3 times. Any games played between divisional opponents after they’ve already played 3 times will not be counted towards divisional standings, but no penalties will be issued to teams.
Regular season standings will be tracked by points. A team will be awarded 3 points for a win ‘out of range,’ 2 points for a win ‘in range,’ 1 point for a loss ‘in range,’ and 0 points for a loss ‘out of range’:
Total number of wins
Head to head results between the tied teams
Best divisional win percentage
Overall quaffle point differential
Most quaffle points for
Fewest quaffle points against
Each division will make their own schedules for the regular season during the pre-season. Guidance on schedule creation will be under the purview of the league commissioner and their office will disseminate the guidance.
Postseason February-April
The postseason starts on February 1 and ends with the completion of the National Championship tournament that will occur on the last weekend in April each year. The postseason is split into three stages, Conference Championships, Regional Championships, and National Championships.
Conference Championships
Conference Championships take place in February and are a conference/USQ hosted partnership event. Each Conference will host an event that culminates with the crowning of a Conference Champion. All conference championships in the four northern-most conferences (Pinecone, Capital, Cornfield, and River Valley) must be hosted at an indoor location. The Conference Champion wins a bid to Nationals.* Each conference’s tournament will be structured slightly differently due to the varying amounts of teams for each conference. Emphasis will be put on playing teams from the opposite division. Each tournament will be required to have a single elimination bracket of at least 8 teams to crown the conference champion. Each tournament will also require the 3rd place game to be played between the losers of the two semi-final games to ensure a clear cut 1-4 teams in the conference. Each team in attendance will be guaranteed at least 4 games at the tournament.
Regional Championships
Regional Championships take place in March and are a USQ-hosted event. The regions will be made by combining two conferences together as follows:
East Region (9 bids)
Pinecone Conference
Capital Conference
North Region (9 bids)
River Valley Conference
Cornfield Conference
South Region (9 bids)
Sunshine Conference
Renegade Conference
West Region (5 bids)
Cactus Conference
Regional Championships will be a fully USQ hosted event with little required input from conference leaders. Teams will be guaranteed 3 games at this event. For the 3 super-regionals (excluding the west), the 8 teams that make up the quarter-finals advance to nationals (assuming one or both conference champions is in that group of 8). Should a conference champion not advance to the quarter-finals, you will have 9 teams that have earned bids. If neither conference champion reaches the quarter-finals then they will play a game against each other on Sunday, the loser will lose their bid to Nationals. If both conference champions reach the quarter-finals, the next 8 teams outside of quarterfinals play a single-elimination bracket for the final bid. The 16 teams competing for bids should be known at the end of day Saturday or at minimum after the first Sunday games. If all 9 bids are decided by the end of the day before brackets, teams 9-16 should still get a consolation bracket to determine tournament standings. Gameplay for these events will be decided upon based on the number of teams attending. Due to the low density of teams in their geographic zone, the Cactus Conference would have their own regionals and teams would compete for 5 nationals bids.
National Championships
The National Championship tournament will take place during the last weekend in April each year. It will be a 32 team tournament.
On Saturday each team that finished in the top 5 of their region will play the teams with the same rank from the other regions to determine bracket seeding (all the 1 seeds play the 1 seeds for bracket seeds 1-4, 2 seeds all play for 5-8, etc...). The 6-9 seeds (only 3 regions send this number of teams) are pooled in groups of 4 (the three 6 seeds and the best 7 seed - best determined by averaging finish places in conference and region - the two remaining 7 seeds and the top two 8 seeds, and the three 9 seeds with the final 8 seed).
After all of those games are completed, there will be a 32 team single elimination bracket. The round of 32 games will be played on Saturday night. The remaining games will be played on Sunday. A third place game will be played before the national Championship game.
This tournament should have 8 fields. Everyone plays 4 games on Saturday and the top 4 teams also play 4 games on Sunday. There will also be a series of exhibition/test rules games on Sunday for the 16 teams that don’t win in the first round of the bracket.
Conclusion
College quidditch conferences are here to stay. The quality and availability of game film and worthwhile competitions have increased exponentially where college quidditch conferences exist. USQ should work with existing conferences to implement a new season structure and make sure that every college team in the country belongs to a conference. Creating new conference structures or leadership from scratch would do more harm than good.
Appendix A
The different colors within a conference designate divisions. The University of Northern Colorado is not assigned to a conference in this graphic, they will need to choose which conference they want to participate in.
