Editorializing: For more information, don't contact the CIS

Give the CIS credit for their commitment to one principle: to make it incredibly difficult for anyone to follow any of their sports.

Even by their standards, they've found new lows.

Friday night, there were 18 men's basketball games played across the country. As of this writing (3:30 ET on Sunday afternoon), not one of the 18 has a boxscore posted on the CIS site, and one doesn't even have a final score! Saturday's games, same deal: 18 games, only one with stats, and three without a final score.

But that's just one sport, right?

Wrong.

  • Women's basketball: 37 games Friday/Saturday, 36 without a boxscore, two without final scores
  • Men's hockey: 31 games, 27 without boxscores, three without scores...and one from Thursday without a boxscore
  • Women's hockey: 18 games, 17 without boxscores, one without a score

That means only seven games (out of 122) have full information, either the day after or two days after the game ended. What a joke. When's the last time you could get by covering a league based on nothing but the final scores?

Yes, you can go to the conferences' sites to find all this information, but that encourages petty regionalism, quadruples the time it takes to substantially cover this league nationwide, and (pay attention now...) makes the entire concept of the central governing body redundant.

Besides, putting the boxscore online requires almost no effort: you've already kept score; now it's just a simple upload. If one school isn't used to uploading to two places (say, to the OUA and CIS sites), then that can be excused, especially in the first week of the season. But this is a week later, and it's everyone in the country. This is no longer a few schools not getting with the program.

What we have here is a top-down failure. Lack of funding is not an excuse. It's a lack of effort, care, and accountability. When's the last time you could say those three qualities were evident at the top of the organization? They certainly aren't there to the same degree as with the athletes and coaches and everyone else who tries to do a good job, in spite of the institution surrounding them.

In short, Canadian interuniversity sport deserves better than to be run by Canadian Interuniversity Sport.
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10 comments:

  1. Well, that was easy. Most boxscores are now up. There's no evidence they sprang into action because of this post, but there's no evidence that it's anything else.

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  2. M-I-C....K-E-Y....

    M.....O.....U.....S.......E

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  3. And hey, even if boxscores are posted, no guarantees that they reflect anything close to reality: apparently, the McGill Martlets took only four shots all game vs. Carleton, curiously equal to the number of goals, but the Carleton goalie made 30 saves.

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  4. You took the words right out of my mouth. Pretty tough to make the CIS the big show in town when results are neither current or accurate. The "new and improved" website...well, it's new.

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  5. For a while the schedule listed the Carleton-Western game as being played on Nov 14, even though the ravens website listed it as Nov 15.

    *sigh*

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  6. I could be wrong, but the CIS doesn't actually supply game information, and relies upon SID's and their colleagues to submit the info to the CIS.

    Likewise, these same folks are required, as part of their membership, to submit the same information to their regional governing bodies (i.e. OUA).

    I think the writer has posed the important question, what is the point of the central governing body, if its redundant? When one considers that there are perhaps 7 individuals that work for the CIS, its not really a surprise to this reader that they are incapable, unwilling, and generally incompetent enough to manage the national interuniversity sporting affairs.

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  7. The OUA website (which has been very good) always defaults in their "live scores" to show the shots listed as the number of goals in that period for hockey, until they receive the shot totals at the end of the game. The Laurier vs UQTR game still has the third period shots as 2-2 and overall 23-21 for UQTR. Laurier outshot UQTR 19-3 in the third, making the overall shots 38-24.

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  8. @Jason: Does this mean the Ottawa Citizen will be doing a story about you? Kidding.

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  9. The CIS Men's Basketball individual stats are a mess, showing players as having played 1 game, for instance, when the game results stats on the same site show the player listed as playing in each of 3 games. Meanwhile, emails to the CIS statistician requesting corrections go unanswered. Hopefully, anyone wanting true stats will know to go to the regional organizations' sites.

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  10. There has been a lot of problem with CIS stats historically and a lot of reasons; website problems, stats company problems (often) and sometimes schools not sending info.

    The schools have to upload the info and if they don't within a required time frame; they are fined.

    With so many game reports missing; I am betting that there was a problem with the stats company the CIS uses; which often happened in the past. There is no way that many schools would not send game reports up within the hour which is the rule of the CIS...

    Best,

    Mike Aylward

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