For as long as
Sailing World has been doing college rankings—they go back to at least 1979, when Ken Legler did them on his own—we've been using a select panel of top coaches to do the honors.
There were a number of reasons for using this system, including the general lack of sailing programs with college coaches in the late 1970s and the prohibitive logistics involved with using a larger panel or opening it up to every college coach.
Times have changed, however, and we are proud to unveil a new system for our bi-weekly college sailing rankings, one that gives one vote to every team in the country with a coach.
Using an Internet polling site, every accredited coach can submit his or her list of the top 20 coed and 15 women's team in the country. Each place is worth a certain number of points (20 points for first in the coed rankings, 19 for second, on down to 1 for 20th; 15 points for first in the women's rankings, 14 for second, on down to 1 for 15th). All the points are tallied and the teams are ranked according to their respective point totals. Any team that receives at least two votes is listed as also receiving votes. The number of first-place votes a team receives is in brackets.
If you have any questions or comments, please send them to
collegerankings@sailingworld.com. You can also sign up for Twitter updates which will alert you whenever a new ranking is posted,
http://twitter.com/swrankings
