okansas.blogspot.com

okansas.blogspot.com
Occassional thoughts about orienteering

Sunday, August 03, 2008

A few notes on goals

I've been thinking a bit about goals. Nothing concrete, but I thought I'd put down a few random thoughts:

1. One of the Olympic diving coaches was talking about something he called the "50 percent rule." The US could realistically have 6 medal chances, so a good Olympics would be to get 50 percent of that.

2. All of the US WOC goals are outcome goals. I think there is some room for process goals. But, that might be just me.

3. Personally, I like the idea of using the peer nations to set some performance goals. I can imagine a US WOC team having a goal of improving the win-loss record compared to the last couple of WOCs. Using head-to-head win-loss records has some nice features (like it counts everyone who starts a race and it means a runner has a chance to help the team as a whole even if they make a boom that would knock them out of contention for qualifying for a final). But, using the peer nations has a huge disadvantage....nobody (except me) cares about it. Goals that nobody cares about are pretty much worthless.

That's enough for now.

Back to okansas.blogspot.com.

posted by Michael | 6:14 PM

2 comments

Comments:

So what happens if the team doesn't achieve their goals?

Spike, in your peer nation won/loss rankings, when did the we do our best? Who was on the team and the characteristics of the team and the WOC?

# posted by

Anonymous : 9:11 PM

The 2007 WOC in Ukraine was where the US had the best wins-losses record against the peer nations in the 4 years that I've tracked it. If my memory is correct, 2008 is the 2nd best of the 4 years.

I've got a spreadsheet with the results and I'll see if I can find it.

Michael

# posted by

Anonymous : 9:06 AM

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