It’s been proposed to start a UK Unicycle Hockey league for some time now. Below are a propsed set of rules drawn up from discussion at the SWUM hockey tournament yesterday, and previous discussions at other events. It is proposed to run the league until BUC in April 2007 using the rules below and then to review the rules at BUC and start the league “properly” after BUC.
If you have any comments please reply to this thread, I realise there may be disagreement about some of the rules, lets start from here and work out the problems as we go along.
Paul
UK Unicycle Hockey League - Proposed rules
General
The League year runs from BUC to BUC.
The League is separate from the BUC tournament. The BUC tournament winners get the UUU Hockey sheild. The league champions get the UUU Cup (when this has been bought).
Every Club should attempt to host one league tournament per year.
Clubs may not host more than one league tournament per year.
Rules
Games will be played using IUF Hockey rules (http://www.unicycling.org/iuf/rulebook/) except where established UK practice is different.
Games will be played with a tennis ball
Points
The format of each tournament will be a series of groups leading to a final. Tournament organisers must endeavour to make the draw for the groups as fair as possible so as not to give any team an advantage.
At the end of the tournament teams will be ranked from winner through to last runner up. Points will be allocated from the bottom of the ranking starting with 1 point for the lowest placed team, 2 for second lowest etc.
For a tournament with 4 teams the points would be as follows
1st Place - Team A - 4 points
2nd Place - Team B - 3 points
3rd Place - Team C - 2 points
4th Place - Team D - 1 points
This scoring system rewards all teams with 1 point for turning up plus 1 point for each team beaten.
Points will be totalled up over the year and the winner of the league will be the club team with the greatest number of points.
Initially points from all tournaments will count towards the total for each club team for the year, however if this leads to big gaps between teams this may be changed to the best X results for each club team where X is less than the number of tournaments played in that year.
Club Teams
A club team can contain any number of players, but only 5 of those players may be on the pitch at a time
A club may enter as many teams as they like, however these teams must be separate entities, no player may play for more than club team in any season.
Each player may only play for one club any season, if a player moves club during the year they must either play for their old club until the next BUC or they may play in scratch teams until the next BUC.
Scratch Teams
To encourage participation by smaller clubs and individuals each tournament will allow entries by scratch teams formed from players from more than one club.
A scratch team may only play together for one tournament. If more than 3 players from a scratch team play together at more than one tournament then they will be treated as a club team and will be subject to club team rules.
Scratch players will compete for the scratch player of the year award. This will run in parallel with the Club team competition.
At each tournament players from each scratch team will be awarded the number of points their team recieve in the ranking, so in the example above if Team C were a scratch team each member would get 2 points.
At the end of the year the player with the greatest number of points will be awarded scratch player of the year.