The new year is well underway and it is now a good time to renew your FPA membership. If you were a paid up member last year, your membership will be expiring on January 31. 

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If you skipped a year or have never been an FPA member before, we hope you will consider becoming one this year. 

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There are many good reasons to become a current, paid-up member of the FPA:

• you’ll have a chance to vote in FPA surveys and elections and have a real influence on the sport
• you’ll get to compete at FPA sponsored tournaments (like FPA Worlds in Medellín, Colombia at the end of August)
• you’ll be entitled to significant discounts on freestyle discs and other merchandise, including rare collector discs at Wrightlife.com (US) and Ultimo.cz (Europe)
• you’ll get your permanent FPA number
• you’ll support activities to spread the jam to new places across the globe!
• you’ll also become eligible to apply for an FPA grant to support your own spread the jam activities
• lastly but importantly, you will give more meaning to the work of many volunteers (members of the FPA board and specialized working groups) who are putting much effort, publicly or behind the scenes, into bettering the sport of freestyle disc

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One more reason to join now!

If you join the FPA before the end of February 2023, part of your membership fee* will be used towards the New Year, New Champion fundraiser which will allow an upcoming player to travel and compete at the FPA World Championships.

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This applies also to all our auto-renewing members using the PayPal subscription payments. If you are one of them, no action is required from your side.

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* 25 % of the Regular fee, 50 % of the Platinum fee 

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Good to know:

• The FPA membership is FREE for the first year (and also for juniors until they turn 18)
• your 2023 membership will be valid till January 31, 2024
• you can check your membership status here

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Find out more and JOIN THE FPA / RENEW YOUR MEMBERSHIP HERE

Dear jammers, here’s a major update on rankings and ratings. Please read down here to learn about it!

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Rankings

• The rankings rank players’ based on their top-8 tournament results over a two-year period. This is the same as the old rankings—only implemented through new technology and with a few minor tweaks. It will continue to be the official rankings used for seeding FPA tournaments for now.
• Players receive points based on how they place in a tournament division. The higher the placement, the more points.
• Players receive more points if there are more players (not teams) in the division.
• Players receive 200 bonus points for FPA Worlds and 100 bonus points for FPA Majors.
• There are no longer bonus points based on beating highly ranked players. (This reduces the system’s complexity and had little impact on the final rankings.)
• The Open rankings does not count mixed or challengers division. This is how the original rankings system was designed. Women’s rankings counts all tournament results.
• COVID Protocol: The rankings counts all tournaments after FPAW 2018 to the end of 2022 except for tournaments during 2020, 2021, and 2022 up to FPAW 2022. (Those tournaments are counted for ratings.)

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Ratings

• The ratings system is a lifetime player rating based on all of the tournament results in the rating system.
• The ratings system uses a different method of calculation based on an ELO model. An ELO model rewards -ratings points based on how players perform relative to their skill—if a player over-performs relative to their skill level, they receive more ELO points.
• The rating system currently has all results from 2013 to the present. More tournaments will be added in the future.
• The rating system will not be used to seed FPA events, but it may be helpful for wildcard seeding.

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(A more detailed and technical explanation for the new ranking and rating systems can be found HERE.)

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Ryan Young developed the code to generate these rankings and ratings to replace the old spreadsheet rankings system. Originally, the FPA intended to phase in the new systems to replace the old system. Unfortunately, there were no resources to continue maintaining the old system and so the FPA is moving ahead with the new systems. In addition, the new ranking system produced results substantially similar to the old ranking system and so the FPA does not expect the changes to affect players’ rankings or seedings going forward.

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Release Schedule: There will be one official year-end ranking per year in December. There will also be a mid-year, non-official rankings: A six-month ranking in June and a pre-FPAW ranking for seeding.

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Send us results: If you have tournament results to add in the future, please contact us at: freestyle_ranking@googlegroups.com. We are working on a new system for tournament directors to send results soon.

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Name Updates: If you appear in the rankings twice under different names, or would like us to change your name, country, or gender, please email us at: freestyle_ranking@googlegroups.com

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Women’s Ranking: If you do not appear on the women’s rankings and think you should, please let us know. We likely need to add a gender designation to your player key in the data.

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The FPA board wish you all a happy new year and a lots of Zzzz!

Greetings freestyle players and interested others!
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A few years have gone by since the FPA held its annual disc design contest to find a new art for the official disc of our organization honoring the World champions from the given year. The reason for the hiatus is quite obvious – because of the Covid pandemic the FPAW had to be postponed by 2 years and also manufacturers struggled with the disc production. Those times are hopefully gone, SkyStylers are being made again and 2022 World champions have been crowned in Milano this September. So it is time to have a new disc! 

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We are now open to submissions for the 2022 FPA discs which will be traditionally printed on Discraft SkyStylers and Wham-O 100-molds. The FPA Board will review all the submissions and will choose one winner.

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If your design is selected as the 2022 FPA Disc, you will receive:

• 5 Skystyler and 5 100-mold discs with YOUR design! 
• Shout-outs and links on the FPA website and social media!

FPA DISC DESIGN CONTEST REQUIREMENTS:

1. Please include the words “Freestyle Players Association” and ” freestyledisc.org” for the Discraft Skystylers and Wham-O 100-molds
   
2. Also, include the FPA’s logo (download it in vectors here) as well as Discraft’s logo (only for the SkyStylers; to be found here)
   
3. Names of the 2022 FPA World Champions* must be included in the design

*Current 2022 champions:

Bianca Koštelová and Ilka Simon (Women’s pairs)

Edoardo Turri and Benedicte Audet (Mixed pairs)

James Wiseman and Mehrdad Hosseinian (Open pairs)

Ryan Young, Pavel Baranyk and James Wiseman (Co-op)
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4. Print specs for the disc are as follows:

• Light ink (no large solid areas) and very little or no ink in the center. Jammers will want to delay the disc upside down, so we need space in the center to allow this;
• Two ink (= foil) colors. You can choose different color combinations for different disc (plastic) colors, although it is preferable that the one color combination is working for all disc colors (usually we do yellow, white and orange). Check all available ink (= foil) colors here
• If your design is selected, then we will have you split the two colors into separate files/layers. But, for the contest, please send us one file with both colors featured.

5. IMPORTANT – please review the art requirements as described by Discraft. It is mandatory the art meet the following requirements before any art is chosen

SUBMISSION

Send questions and artwork to membership@freestyledisc.org. Artwork will be organized and narrowed down by the FPA Board of Directors. Artwork selected becomes property of the FPA and the FPA reserves the right to modify the selected design.

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DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: JANUARY 31

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We look forward to receiving your designs and thank you all for your continued support of the Freestyle Players Association!

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With Zzzzs,

*Your FPA Board of Directors*

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For the reference and inspiration, here you can check the winning designs from past years:

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