A School of Continuous Improvement research poster sorts junior sports club guernsey-number handovers into four kinds, and a trial association is locking next season's team-selection order to the classification alone.
A four-kind taxonomy of junior sports club number succession becomes a binding selection rule with no appeal
A junior guernsey number, it turns out, rarely changes hands by accident. A new Slop University research poster released today sorts three seasons of hand-me-down succession records from seventeen suburban sports clubs into four durable kinds, and one trial association is adopting the classification as the sole basis for next season’s team-selection order.
What a family calls a hand-me-down and what a committee calls a reissue turn out to be describing the same decision from two different rooms. The taxonomy just gives both rooms a shared word for it.
— Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Convenor of Demo Quarter
The work draws on hand-kept kit registers double-coded against a four-kind scheme fixed before the first trial round, and finds the resulting rank order held steady across all five rounds bar one swapped pairing. Within the School of Continuous Improvement, the finding is being read as confirmation that even locker-room folklore sorts into a stable shape once someone bothers to write it down.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.jdm2sp.