The Sixty Day Rule

At the 2005 AGM it was agreed that the Council would review the selection process for international representation, with particuilar regard to the possible impementation of a ‘60 Day Rule”

The method for selection in place at present is selection based on chart position on the day the invite is received. Read ‘selection process’ for more information.

The ‘Sixty Day Rule’ was a proposed alternative. In essence it was this:

The selection of couples could be based on the chart position a set number of days prior to the competition. I am going to refer to this day as the “trigger” day from now on – because it would be the day the invite process could be “triggered”.

The 60 days is a slightly arbitrary number, 90 days was also suggested but was too much, 45 - too little, but 60 was seen as just right! (We would like to thank Goldylocks and the Three Bears for their help with this.)

The advantage to this method is that all couples can know in advance what date the selection would be made. For example, if the comp was to be held on the 15th March, then selection would be done on the charts on the 14th January (unless of course the olympics are on), or say, 20th September, its easy enough to work out the selection would take place on the 22nd of July.

Inevitably there will be selection comps on the day or one day after the trigger date, and we would have pressure to ‘just this once’ bend the rules to allow for inclusion of the result from that competition, after all it would be a more up to date chart, but that would remove the automatic element of the selection process and render the system unworkable.

We would also need to consider what would happen if a competition was to change date, by a day or so, but not issue a new invite.

Also we would encounter a problem in maintaining an even split of Chart Rated comps throughout the year as organisers would not wish to hold comps immediately after the trigger dates for major events as no one would be likely to bother with them.

But these are just minor issues that could be resolved.
So what are the objections to this proposal?

1 Economic.
Some organisers send out the invites many months in advance. One advantage for us with this is that we can book flights early, so we get them much cheaper. By doing so, we can save a lot of your money. We had an example this year of a delay in booking flights by just one week resulted in an increase flight cost of nearly £100. Multiply the delay by a few months! As finances are finite, if we remove our ability to take advantage of this early booking, we will not be able to send as many couples overseas as we do at present.

2 Administrative.
It is felt, by those that would have to implement the procedure that this would result in an unacceptable increase in workload. At present, an invite comes in, it is dealt with there and then. With this scheme, the invite would have to filed somehow until the trigger date, and only looked at then. It was feared that some invites could quite simply be forgotten about. (We’re only human!)

3 Closing Dates
If the closing date for a competition, (the date when names have to be registered with the organiser), is before the trigger date, we would be unable to send a couple to that competition. Despite receiving an invitation in plenty of time, and a couple being available, we would be bound by our own rules to have to have to turn down the invite.

The timescale from getting the invite, to confirming the couple is, on average about a fortnight. So, if the closing date for the competition is just after the trigger day, again we run the risk of not sending a couple because we can not administer our own system fast enough.

Assume closing date is just after the trigger date, and the top couple decides it does not wish to go. By delaying their reply they can effectively prevent the next couple from taking part. There would be nothing we could do about it.

There are two possible solutions to this.
1 set the trigger date so far in advance that all closing dates are within the time period. This will result in EADA always selecting from ‘out of date’ charts – a critism of the current system is that it occasionally does that, but not every time!

2 Come up with a sub clause that the trigger date would be X days prior to the comp, unless the closing date is within +/- Y days of (comp - X) , when the trigger date would be closing date plus Z . That would resolve the problem but … Ladies and Gentlemen, the simple, easy to calculate trigger date has just left the building! Which was the reason for the change in the first place and negates the biggest benefit this system offered.

The current solution, that we select from the chart on the date of receiving the invite is not perfect, but it works.

Submitted by Martyn 24/7/06