posted Jan 13th, 2016 - Yippee! I found another playground! It is so much fun to be so deeply involved in this sport. OK, I will never make a lot of money, but I have to admit that I love my job, and that alone has a lot of value. Anyhow, one of the cool things about my job is that I am not restricted or limited by rules and regulations, procedures and sanctions. I love that part.

Remember two months ago, when I was exposing some of the judges? I had nothing to lose, so I could stick my neck out as far as I wanted. OK, I was a little bit nervous, but thanks to the wonderful audience I was so strongly encouraged and supported that it easily paid back for all the pain. So once again I'm going to disregard restrictions, go out on a limb, and ignore any potential repercussions. It is with great pleasure that I announce the SKYLEAGUE.COM "Team World Rankings."

TURNING POINTS: Team World Rankings

Now some of you may be wondering, "Wait just a minute Kurt, how are team rankings controversial?" Well, the FAI/IPC already provides their own world rankings, but those rankings have serious shortcomings.

For starters, it has always bothered me that the official FAI/IPC rankings at World Meet and World Cup focus entirely too much on countries. Teams are only identified as a country and by flags and other forms of rather impersonal identification. Now don't get me wrong, representing your country is one the great opportunities and privileges in our sport. But our sport is far more about teams than just the countries they represent at major competitions. Teams have names and are made up of team members who are proud of those team names and lineups, believe me.

A few years ago FAI/IPC created their own world rankings. In addition to the focus on countries versus teams, some of the rankings were so bizarre and so far off that I wrote a few articles to correct, or at least explain, some of the strange rankings. For example, you may recall that the FAI World Rankings at the end of 2012 had the U.S., represented by Arizona Airspeed, in tenth place!

The NSL Team World Rankings address both of the shortcomings of the FAI/IPC rankings. They place greater emphasis on the team and team names, and less emphasis on the country a team represents. Doing so is nothing new to the NSL, of course. After all, that has been a fundamental part of the NSL from the very beginnings of the NSL and SKYLEAGUE.COM.

The NSL Team World Rankings are compiled by comparing meet averages, which yields more accurate results.

Now, we cannot claim all 4-way wisdom; there are flaws and factors within the NSL ranking method that should be noted, and perhaps someday addressed. The biggest unknown factor is the value of the competition draw. We have not yet introduced a system that accounts for the difference between competition draws. As any experienced competitor will tell you, the competition draw can significantly impact the meet average. Some draws are "fast" and inherently present an opportunity for higher averages, whereas other draws are "slow" and restrain averages to a lower scoring level.

Rank	4-way Open Top 10 - Indoor 2015	Country	Averages	Best 3
1	NMP-PCH Hayabusa	BE	30.4 - 30.1 - 31.1 - 31.3	30.9
2	Arizona Airspeed	US	29.4 - 28.7 - 30.5	29.5
3	Weembi Lille	FR	26.8 - 29.5	28.2
4	Golden Knights	US	25.4 - 26.2 - 29.4 - 27.7	27.8
5	Black Cat	RU	28.1 - 26.2	27.2
6	SDC Rhythm XP	US	26.6 - 27.3	27.0
7	Evolution	CA	26.9	26.9
8	French Girls	FR	25.2 - 26.9	26.1
9	France 4-way Open	FR	26.2 - 26.0	26.1
10	Thunder ISR	BE	25.4 - 25.7 - 26.8	26.0
10	Gavroche	FR	26.1 - 25.7 - 26.3 - 24.9	26.0

The NSL Team World Rankings include most, if not all, 4-way teams that have competed in a particular year, not just the top teams. On the one hand this is a strength, since including more teams makes for more interesting ranking results. However it also means more events and more events means more draws. More events and draws mean the influence of any given draw may be greater than a method that perhaps relies more heavily on head-to-head results than averages.

However, we believe that the deviation caused by the draw, in either direction, is acceptable. A 10-round draw still exhausts almost the complete dive pool every time, which is at least a reasonable foundation for rankings based on meet averages. And if teams attend more than one competition annually there are more opportunities to compare head-to-head results.

So, there they are, the official SKYLEAGUE. COM "Team World Rankings," indoor and outdoor.

It was great fun to see the compiled results, with great thanks to the NSL webmasters who have helped to manage and maintain the data over the years.

Rank	4-way Open Top 10 - Outdoor 2015	Country	Averages	Best 3
1	Arizona Airspeed	US	27.8 - 25.6 - 26.5	26.6
2	NMP-PCH Hayabusa	BE	25.7 - 25.0 - 26.9	25.9
3	SDC Rhythm XP	US	24.5 - 23.6	24.1
4	Golden Knights	US	23.3 - 22.4 - 22.7	22.8
5	Black Cat	RU	21.8 - 21.9 - 21.3 - 23.4	22.4
6	Thunder ISR	BE	22.1	22.1
7	Carolina Turbo XP	US	22.0 - 21.7	21.9
8	Qatar Tigers	QA	21.4	21.4
9	France 4-way Open	FR	21.7 - 20.9	21.3
9	French FLY-IN Girls	FR	19.9 - 20.3 - 21.3 - 22.4	21.3

It has been so interesting and exciting to follow the development of teams and competitors, and to be able to explain the history of teams and competitors along with the hard numbers from competition results. I can't wait to see the final results at the end of the year.

The Clash of Champions 2015 and ISR Grand Prix 2015 have completed, so the current indoor rankings will likely be the final ones for 2015. But some suspense still remains for the outdoor rankings because as I'm writing this, the World Air Games 2015 are just around the corner.

Speaking of suspense, NMP PCH Hayabusa and Arizona Airspeed continue to dominate 4-way competition these days in thrilling ways, but the situation and rankings behind the two top teams are just as interesting...