IBSA Goalball is working hard to make the IBSA Goalball World Rankings more accurate and professional. To further do this, the requirements that a tournament will now have to meet to be eligible to be a ranking tournament has now become a lot more stringent.

The first requirement is that in the particular division, there must be at least three national teams competing and no club teams participating. Therefore, you could have a tournament split into two categories, one of national teams only and the other for club teams. You could also have it that your male division meets the requirements but your female division doesn’t. This means that the male division could still count as a ranking tournament. The main point is that a particular division must be of national teams only and at no point in the tournament do they play against club teams.

Furthermore to this, you cannot have more than one team from one country in any division. Sometimes in a friendly tournament, you may see for example Austria 1 and Austria 2 or Chile A and Chile B in the same men’s division. In this case, that tournament would no longer be eligible.

The tournament must be played under full IBSA Goalball Rules and Regulations. A tournament organiser does have the right to make small changes to the rules and still have their tournament counted but they do need to inform the IBSA Goalball subcommittee of this first in writing. Changes could be for example 5 minutes between matches instead of 15 or 10 minute halves.

To ensure that the tournament is being officiated at an acceptable level, all referees must be IBSA Goalball level I certified or higher or the tournament can also run alongside an IBSA Goalball referees clinic.

It is also important that the tournament is an open tournament. To show that the tournament was an open tournament (open for all nations to compete at) the tournament must had been advertised on the IBSA Goalball website. A tournament organiser still has the right to limit how many teams compete but all nations should have the opportunity to compete at the tournament.

Another point is that the results of the tournament must be made immediately available for publishing on the IBSA website. This must be done by the technical delegate e-mailing the results to the IBSA Goalball regulations officer ([email protected]).

You can apply to have your tournament classed as a ranking tournament.  There is a simple application form which is then returned to the regulations officer. This form can be found at the IBSA Goalball website on our forms page.

One final change that has taken place from 1st January 2015 is that the ranking of your opponent will now be taken into consideration when calculating your points from matches. This was previously not done because we wanted to build a strong database with four years of results before we take the opponents ranking into consideration. This means that a win against the number one team in the world is worth more than a win against the 50th ranked team in the world.

If you have any questions on any of this information or would like more details, please feel free to contact the regulations officer, Rob Crestani, on [email protected].