A School of Emergent Priorities study compares 24 junior sport clubs' minimum-game-time by-law compliance rates against next-season re-registration, finding no relationship between the association's headline indicator and the outcome it is meant to protect.
Two seasons of team-sheet audits across 24 clubs test whether by-law compliance tracks who re-registers; it does not.
A junior sport association’s minimum-game-time by-law has, since its introduction, done exactly what a by-law is meant to do: every club now complies. A new Slop University study asks what that compliance actually buys the players it was written to protect, and the answer complicates the association’s own scorecard.
Released today, the study draws on two seasons of team-sheet audits across 24 clubs, matching each club’s by-law compliance rate against the following season’s registration rolls. The two move independently of each other — a club complying at 76 per cent keeps its players at roughly the same rate as a club complying at 98 per cent.
A compliance rate earns its keep by tracking something. This one tracks a team sheet.
— Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
It is the kind of gap the School of Emergent Priorities exists to go looking for, and one its researchers are in no hurry to smooth over. “The study asks a question the association’s own facility-allocation formula was never built to answer, and we’re glad it’s finally sitting next to the numbers,” says co-author Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Strategic Drift Survey.
The association’s facility-allocation formula continues to weight by-law compliance as its junior-development indicator; the study changes what is known about that weighting, not the weighting itself. The full research poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.f0qf5u.