There are top 100 lists published every two months that are by age, but can these also be disaggregated by state as well (e.g., the top 100 eleven year olds in Nebraska)?
No, because of privacy concerns.
A list of the ‘top 100 under 21’ players for a state like Nebraska would likely list all players under 21, giving their age.
That is farther than we feel we can safely go in terms of having information about our younger members on our website.
Under some circumstances we may be able to generate such a list for a state chapter (such as to assist them with selecting
representatives for the Denker tournament), but with the departure of Jerry Nash I’m not sure who would handle those requests.
I’m not doubting the existence and importance of the privacy concerns, but I was wondering whether the same privacy concerns exist for the top 100 X-year-olds in the USA? Lists now exist for 7, 8, 9, …, etc.
If we did not have a long history of putting Top 100 lists by age in the Rating Supplements, I’d probably recommend that we have NO age information available on the website at all.
Would you rather we remove all the age-based Top 100 lists from the website?
CalChess has published ranking lists for Northern California for over a decade. The only way to compile these is from the USCF Top 100 page. Other than the tournaments calendar, this is the most popular page on the state website.
norcalchess.org/top_lists/ca … n_USCF.pdf
The state Top 20 lists (age 12-17 and age U-12) can be derived from the Top 100 page as well.
fpawn.blogspot.com/2010/01/calch … 12-17.html
fpawn.blogspot.com/2010/01/calch … -u-12.html
In the five years or so that I compiled these lists, I don’t recall receiving a single complaint from a parent asking to have their son or daughter removed from the list for privacy reasons. To the contrary, the parents tended to be very quick to notify me if I omitted a name. These lists serve as a major motivational tool for kids (and their parents).
Michael Aigner
FWIW, over the years I have seen dozens of emails (mostly from parents) complaining that someone was not on an age-based Top 100 list. Some of those complaints have been legitimate oversights, mostly due to data issues (like a missing or incorrect birthdate), but most have been more of the “Why didn’t Johnny get 25 points in event X rather than 15 points, since that would have put him on the Top 100 list?” variety, or complaints about an event that did not (or did) make the cutoff for that supplement.
I don’t recall even ONE email asking us to remove someone who was legitimately on a national Top 100 list from the website, though we do occasionally get requests to remove someone’s name and tournament results from our website. Most of those come from former members, but we do get a few from parents concerned about any information about their children being on our website.
I still would have concerns over giving nearly everyone’s age out, especially in smaller states. Even a “Top 5 age 12” by state list might be the same as a complete list of 12 year old members in some states.
I believe the Scholastic Committee/Council shares my concerns in this area, and so far neither the EB nor the Delegates have chosen to address this issue.