by Mike Wills on Sun Feb 03, 2008 1:04 am
The Super A/A/B thing provides good guidelines and objective goals to shoot for, but, what we normally do is look at the field, budget, and AD willingness to provide multiple medal sets. Sometimes the games have a budget that will only allow for a couple of judges and one set of medals, then we have an Open class where you might see a national champion level guy throwing with a complete beginner. When we have competitions that allow for us to split into an A group and an Open group (I never use B group in the results because NASGA didn't used to include those scores in the rankings...don't know if that has changed?) we generally go by whether or not a guy is willing to go to the A group, will be fairly competitive...and can handle the heavy caber without getting hurt. The guidelines that Rich linked to are good guidelines, but they aren't followed absolutely.
We even sometimes just ask guys who maybe one a B competition or two whether they want to move up...if they do...then have at it. It's really arbitrary, we're all amateurs, sometimes we just get to split it up if money, field, and staff allows.