World games mixed stats...

it seems like there is quite a bru-ha-ha about the involvement of women in the coed game. i remember thinking about this during the world games as i looked at some of goals scored and assist data being reported from the tourney. as i understand it, those games were all played with 4 men and 3 women on the field at all times. this allows us to set some expectations about each gender's involvement in the number of goals.

i made an assumption of randomness, meaning that i expected that any player on the field was equally likely to throw a goal and each receiver was equally likely to receive a goal, which allowed us to group by gender. of course it isn't true that each player has the same likelihood of throwing/receiving a goal, whether the game is same-sex or mixed, but for the purpose of argument let's just go with it. under random conditions we would expect that 4 out of 7 goals would be thrown by men, and that their goals would be evenly split between men and women (because when a guy has the disc, 3 of his receivers are male and 3 are female). 3 out of 7 goals should be thrown by women and two-thirds of their goals should go to men and only one-third should go to women. so for a given goal, the probability of it being:

• man to man = (4/7) * 0.5 = 0.2857
• man to woman = (4/7) * 0.5 = 0.2857
• woman to man = (3/7) * (2/3) = 0.2857
• woman to woman = (3/7) * (1/3) = 0.1428

my review of the scoresheets from the world games site shows the following breakdown of goals, with the opponent order being japan, canada, germany, australia, finland, australia (gold medal match).

• man to man = (8, 9, 7, 8, 7, 7) 46
• man to woman = (1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 1) 10
• woman to man = (2, 2, 4, 4, 3, 5) 20
• woman to woman = (2, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0) 4

so they scored 80 goals over the course of the weekend, our expectations should have been 23, 23, 23, and 11. as you can see the man to man goals were double the expected value, with woman to man goals being about expected. the big dropoff occurred in the category where women should be receiving goals. why aren't the women catching goals? as someone who never plays competitive coed ultimate i don't quite understand it. my questions would be along the lines of: are the women cutting for goals? are the passes to them being thrown but are out of their range or being dropped? is the fear of men poaching so great that it's best not to throw to women (especially for long goals)?

i think that you'll actually find that the US team was one of the better balanced among the teams in attendance. a quick look at the 3rd place gamesheet shows that the canadian women threw 2 of their 15 goals, with men on the receiving end of all their goals.

70 by 40 is born...

the goal of this site is to have an outlet for a few ultimate players to sound off on various happenings in the ultimate world. there's no guarantees that it will prove to be anything interesting, but just maybe there will be some clever, insightful or thought provoking material that others outside our group will find enjoyable.

but seriously, is there anything more self-important than a blog? it was only a matter of time.