I wrote a policy also. Here it is:
This proposal is designed to help USPSA determine which teams to officially support with slots/funding as those things become available.
This policy would be in addition to the already official USPSA Team selection policy. This policy also would need to come in to effect after USPSA determines a slot award policy for individual USPSA (non team) members. This proposal would be a supplement to those policies.
USPSA is already committed to supporting the following teams:
Open
Standard
Production
Classic
Open Junior
Open Lady
Based on participation data, it seems that Open has seen a real decline in participation. If a new policy were being crafted today I suspect that Open Junior and Open Lady would not be the first two categories that USPSA would support. In any event, that commitment has been made publicly, and it seems difficult and unfair for USPSA to back away from it.
Moving forward, USPSA needs an objective way to determine what categories to offer support for and what categories not to. Obviously this is depending on two many factors:
1. Slots
USPSA will of course only be allocated a certain number of slots. There will likely be a policy in place soon for individuals to earn slots (non-team) based on performance and perhaps even a block of slots saved for a random draw lottery style system. Some slots will also likely be set aside for the RD to use his own discretion and award them as he sees fit.
2. Money
USPSA is not bound to offer any support to anyone that it has not already committed to. However, in the event that funds are available and the organization sees fit, it may offer to support additional teams.
In the event that USPSA has both slots and money available to support additional teams, I don't think anyone would object to supporting additional category teams. Using an objective system to determine where that support goes seems sensible, so I propose the following scheme.
We look at team participation data from the World Shoot in Florida. We then rank every category in terms of participation. The most heavily attended categories by teams will take first priority. For example, if one category had 8 teams and another had 6 teams, the category with 8 teams would be a priority for USPSA to support as it's own team. In the even of a tie, we will look not only to the Florida World Shoot, but also to Greece. We will analyze the trend. If one category is flat or declining and another is growing, the growing category will break the tie and take priority.
Using this scheme I have ranked all the IPSC categories:
Team participation is shown in parenthesis.
Open Senior (12)
Production Senior (9)
Standard Senior (9)
Standard Lady (6)
Production Lady (5)
Open Lady (5)
Junior Production (3)
Junior Open (3)
It should be noted that junior production and junior open are a true tie using this system, with identical data for both of the World Shoots we are looking at.