Minneathlon selection rules

June 12th, 2008 at 01:27pm by Mark Teskey

One of the toughest early challenges to putting together Minneathlon 2.0 was deciding how to pick the contestants. It was easy last time - put the names in the hat and draw 6. This time, we’ve got 8 teams, we’ve got three automatic entries (more on that later), and we’ve got teams that both raced before and applied before. We also realized that there is a problem with precedence - assuming we’ll do this again.

In the end, we really wanted to favor multi-time applicants that didn’t get selected before. We also still wanted to give a small chance to everyone - even if you raced last time. We ultimately used a weighted probability system where a varying amount of points were awarded depending on a few factors. Here is the ruleset we finally landed on:

• Boston: One automatic entry, decided by the Boston office
• Austin: One automatic entry, decided by the Austin office
• Prior race organizer: One automatic entry

The other five spots were drawn using the random method and the following formula:

• 10 points per person for their first application without having been previously selected
• 5 points per person for each subsequent application
• 1 point per person for having run the race before (the score resets to one once a person gets selected)

We ended up with the following weighting:

• Lefty and Skinny – 30 points
• XLR-99 – 30 points
• 0xDEADBEEF – 25 points
• TRYIT -25 points
• Intern – 20 points
• Clueless Jokesters – 20 points
• Team Tim – 11 points
• Team Ramrod – 2 points
• DJ Lloyd and Mixmaster Harry – 2 points

Stay tuned for the actual announcement of racers! We’ve already made the selections and we’ll publish them soon.

Entry Filed under: Announcements, Racers, Rules