Imagine, for a moment, that as you watched your club championship last year, you were inspired. You felt that with a bit of work, your own game might be good enough to claim the club championship. You decided to go for it.
You started to watch your diet. You began to get up extra early in the morning to have time to train. You ran wind sprints. You investigated the local tournament schedule and played in some events. And you got better.
As the championship got closer, you sized up your competition, and you felt pretty good about your chances. In fact, most people already acknowledged that you were the best player in the club. You were looking forward to formally establishing it in front of the club crowd. (And though you might not tell anyone, you were kind of looking forward to having your name in gold letters on the club wall.)
But it didn’t happen. You lost. And looking back, you are confused. After all, you were ready, you played well, and you beat all your fellow club members. But somehow, you still didn’t win the club championship. “How is that possible?” you keep asking yourself. But you already know the answer: it was because you lost to a ringer.
It seems unfair, doesn’t it? This sense of inequity is what riles many of the age-group players in our national championships. A number of years ago, the USSRA made the courageous decision (with a little prodding from Steve Green, who donated the funds to establish the SL Green Championship) to close the open-level divisions of the Men’s and Women’s championships to US Citizens only. But partly because of our close relationship with Canada, the USSRA decided to suspend its decision on age-group competition.
Another factor was that a primary USSRA goal at the time was to establish open age-group competition in the—now defunct—North American Open. The theory was that the USSRA didn’t want to take a competition away from any of its members, and by creating an alternate place where non-citizens could compete, the USSRA then would be able to close the national championships to non-citizen age-group competitors. It was a good plan, but with the demise of the North American, the age-group citizenship decision was put on hold.
One thing that must be made clear is that this situation is no one’s fault, for even though we all know a ringer when we see one (it is the 15-year-old Mark McGwire-lookalike who is playing on the Under-13 Little League team; it is the semi-pro bowler who suddenly is on the county team when the play-offs roll-around; and it is the non-member squash player who wins the club championship), one thing that is clear is that none of this is ever the ringer’s fault. The ringer often gets blamed, but that is silly, for the competitor is almost always simply playing by the rules.
Similarly, the rules for eligibility have been going through an evolution, and where once they were more concerned with the amateur-pro distinction than with jingoism, citizenship is now the issue that has become hotly discussed.
One side of the debate says that the nature of competition is to prove oneself against worthwhile competition—any worthwhile competition. This argument makes a lot of sense for the elite-level competitor, for “if you are going to be the best, you have to beat the best.”
Others, however, say that there is value in understanding where you stand in relation to a peer-group. And while there are many ways to look at peerdom, three of the most common in sports are ages, ability level and geography. That is why there are age-group competitions, why there are skill level competitions, and why there are club, regional, national and international championships.
Most people would agree that it is a bit beside the point to allow thirty-year-olds compete against sixty-year-olds in an age-group competition. Most would also agree that if you are going to have a skill level competition, it doesn’t make much sense to allow an A player to enter the C division. It seems only logical then that most also would agree that the United States (read: “geography-based”) national championships should be closed to non-citizens.
The USSRA’s goal of introducing an alternate competition where the best age-groupers from all over would come to the US to compete before dealing with the citizenship issue is admirable, but while we wait for that introduction, a lot of national championships are being contested. Perhaps the newly purchased US Open title will afford the USSRA the opportunity to create that alternate event (a US Open and a US Closed sounds awfully good). But even if it doesn’t, the time to act is now—before the open door no longer can be closed.
