I am planning to create a scholastic affiliate to use the K-12 JTP program for my local school. I have 2 questions.
1. Can student having USCF IDs created through JTP program compete against students with normal paid USCF membership? (All students are from the same school).
2. I have about 17 students with ratings and about 40 without ratings. I am planning to do small round robin tournaments with groups of 4 or 5 students. Would a group of all unrated players receive ratings or does have to be a player with a rating already in every group for unrated players to receive a rating?
You can have a mix of members and non-members in a JTP event, but they all need IDs, of course.
I’ve seen quite a few events (mostly youth quads) where all the players are unrated, it uses birthdates to initialize the ratings. Until those players compete against players with established ratings, they will not be reliably accurate against other players but will be good enough for relative rankings within that small pool of players.