The scoop on setting up a ski racing fantasy league

Intrigued by the notion of putting together a fantasy ski racing league?
    Our recommendation is “go for it.” The Ski Racing staff did it last season and found it was not only a whole lot of fun, but also an informative exercise. You’ll find when you’ve got a skier on “your” team, you’ll pay a lot of attention, not only to where they place, but also to how they’re skiing, how much rest they’re getting between races, how healthy they are and where they stack up against the rest of any given field.

INTRIGUED BY THE notion of putting together a fantasy ski racing league?
    Our recommendation is “go for it.” The Ski Racing staff did it last season and found it was not only a whole lot of fun, but also an informative exercise. You’ll find when you’ve got a skier on “your” team, you’ll pay a lot of attention, not only to where they place, but also to how they’re skiing, how much rest they’re getting between races, how healthy they are and where they stack up against the rest of any given field.
    Here’s the field-tested setup the Ski Racing staff used last season (and will use this winter). Each team manager fields a team made up of six World Cup ski racers. We used two “overall” positions and scored all of the points those racers earned. The other four positions are “discipline” positions (DH, SL, GS, SG) and those racers score only the points obtained in that discipline. We break the season down into weekly periods and set up a head-to-head format for our teams to go at each other. The team with the most weekly wins tops the league. Total points are used only as a tiebreaker, or for seeding.
    This season we’ve included a standard fantasy twist to the format by introducing a playoff conducted over the final three weeks. We’ll crown a new champion at the conclusion of the World Cup Finals.
    It’s all pretty simple, but there is some “book work” for the league administrator, because somebody actually has to do all these calculations to figure out who wins each week. But once everything is set up and the season is under way, its relatively easy.
    The toughest part for our staff, because we aren’t all located in one place, was conducting the draft. We had as many people as possible meet in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and ran through it over a couple rounds of beers. Use a serpentine selection process, with the first drafting team selecting first in round one and last in round two, reversing the draft order with each set of selections. We recommend an eight- to 12-team league.
    We don’t include “bench” positions, so there’s no weekly shifting of players as there is in most fantasy leagues in other sports. But we do allow our managers to make changes, picking up “free agents” to replace skiers who might become injured or are just not performing. We use a three-day waiting period for “waiver wire” pickups of players dropped from other teams.
    Basically, your league can organize any way it wants. The key is to have a blast, and enjoy the ski racing season just a little bit more.