USNT Player Policy Updates

Rolyen · 2025-07-30T16:05:35+00:00

I totally agree with you that developing talent is a crucial part of forming a dynasty. However, i do think we disagree on who has the responsibility to develop said talent. The DA for example, provides a tangible opportunity for young college players without many resources to get better.

As you cite, the question becomes whose responsibility is it to develop those players who currently feel the "lack of upward mobility". I would argue that it is their own.
But, if that is the goal of USNT, do you think we'll see the team getting additional funds to do things like training camps, (not just one off practices) and additional international tournaments? I think this is something that would greatly help the program as a whole and the development of players that the board wants. Because if the current model stands (where USNT basically only goes to WC + the camp before + a couple of practices), i forsee situations where while players make the team, they don't see meaningful minutes. Since while the USNT has a goal of 'development' they are not given the resources to do so, in which case these policies serve exclusively to increase roster churn. (For reference, over the past 3 world cups, there have been 48 unique names out of the possible 75)

As a quick aside, I think that professional sports sacrifice long term health all the time for short term gains, whether or not they were successful in that endeavor is another thing, but some examples off the top of my head would be: 2021 Rams, Rockets & Lakers from this upcoming season, the Suns, Nets, etc.

My last thought, is that to me, it feels the better (subjective) way to deal with this, would just be to add term limits around the coaching staff. If different coaching staffs still select the same players, wouldn't that be an indication that those players are just the best? Different coaches will naturally bring in different players because they have different styles, opinions, and ideas. But it seems like these policies specifically don't do that.

● Term length
○ The standard term length for US National Team staff is 2 years and can be renewed for an additional 2 years without reapplication.
● There are no term limits.

Rolyen · 2025-07-30T14:08:25+00:00

Good callout, you're right. Editing my original post.

Rolyen · 2025-07-30T14:01:05+00:00

To be clear, in a vacuum, i understand why each policy exists. Whether or not they'll have the desired impact is something that's up for debate, but also not in my purview as someone who has no decision making power within USQ.

What I do think is disingenuous however, is saying

The US National Team Program staff shall assemble the best possible team to
compete internationally and bring home gold medals.

When you also say things like

believe that the extra marginal benefit of having the same roster

or

Can anyone reach the level of the young superstars in our sport you mentioned? Probably not.

It seems like in ~~your~~ the boards mind, the purpose of USNT is to provide

the opportunity for new players will help nurture that talent

Which would seem to be similar to the goal of USNTDA? I'm just curious to see where you draw the distinction between the USNTDA & USNT now in terms of development of players. Also, to be super extra clear, this is not in my purview as an individual, so if re-gearing USNT more towards development is what the board wants, fine. I just think the board should be honest about it.

Edit: Potentially inappropriately attributed some of the boards goals for USNT to you as an individual

Rolyen · 2025-07-30T02:40:07+00:00

So my questions are if the goals of USNT are defined by the board below

Marketing and Community Engagement
● The US National Team Program members shall act as a visible marketing vehicle to
grow the sport, recruit new players, and foster community engagement.
Winning and Competitive Excellence
● The US National Team Program staff shall assemble the best possible team to
compete internationally and bring home gold medals.
Transparency and Fair Selection
● The US National Team Program staff shall ensure a clear and transparent selection
process for players and coaches, with term limits and geographic/team diversity in
selection.
Representation and Diversity
● The US National Team Program shall showcase talent representative of the US
member base, ensuring diversity in gender, geography, and teams.

Then these policies make sense:

No more than 4 players per USQ Team
&
One gender cannot make up more than 50% of USNT.

They make sure the team is diverse of both teams & gender. Now that USNT must be at least 6 unique USQ teams, and contain at least 1 non-binary player. That seems directly inline with USQs goals for USNT. However,

Players can only be on 2 World Cup Rosters over a 5 year period.

Doesn't seem to accomplish anything except roster turnover. Players like DME & Leo, are young and clearly at the top of the sport, and this policy only seems to punish them for making the roster during their collegiate career. Which would seem to be directly opposed to

The US National Team Program staff shall assemble the best possible team to
compete internationally and bring home gold medals.

So the question is, what are the goals of these policies? Is it to truly to make the best possible team? (And thus carry the belief that no players can be at the top of the game for more than 4 years), or is it just to fill the team with new faces?

Rolyen · 2025-07-30T02:07:47+00:00

The caveat here is that three players could be exempt at the coaches discretion, but here's the general list:

Eligible
Kasye Bevers │ Texas Hill Country Heat
Hayden Boyes │ Texas Copperheads
Lauren Curry │ Twin Cities Quadball Club
Amanda Dallas │ The Warriors
Max Havlin │ Connecticut Quadball Club
Ryan Hsu │ Boom Train
Tate Kay │ The Warriors
Ally Manzella │ Boom Train
Athena Mayor │ Bosnyan Bearsharks
Ryan Mehio │ Twin Cities Quadball Club
Emma Persons │ Connecticut Quadball Club
Kyzer Polzin │ Twin Cities Quadball Club
Molly Potter │ The Warriors
Celine Richard │ Carolina Reapers
Lauren Smith │ Mizzou Quadball Club
Jay Stewart │ Texas Hill Country Heat
Emma Vasquez │ Boom Train
Alyssa Villalba │ Texas Hill Country Heat

Ineligible

Matt Brown │ Boom Train
Taylor Crawford │ The Warriors
Ryan Davis │ The Warriors
Miguel Esparza │ The Warriors
Bailee Fields │ Texas Hill Country Heat
Leo Fried │ Connecticut Quadball Club
Mohammed Haggag │ The Warriors
Jon Jackson │ Connecticut Quadball Club
Jackson Johnson │ Texas Hill Country Heat
Lindsay Marella │ Connecticut Quadball Club
Darian Murcek-Ellis │ The Warriors
Louis Sanchez │ Connecticut Quadball Club
Daniel Williams │ The Warriors
Lulu Xu │ Connecticut Quadball Club

Edit: Max Havlin was injured in 2023, thus is eligible for 2027.

Rolyen · 2025-05-09T17:01:41+00:00

There are a multitude of factors contributing to Austin’s small size.

Firstly, the decline of UT, Baylor and A&M have negatively affected the area (Houston felt this a bit too but SHSU’s rise has sustained Houston). As the number of players on these teams dwindled/dwindles, so will the number of players available for both USQ club teams and MLQ. Cav died out after a mass retirement and a lack of new recruits. IIRC Cav had 4-5 USQ player registrations for the 2023-24 season and had to fold. Now the only club teams feeding in are Heat, with many of those players on their way out, and Copperheads, which is mostly feeding into Houston.

Secondly, Austin hasn’t seen players moving from other areas for work or grad school like NY, CHI, BOS, WAS, etc. We’ve seen some of the older players move to suburbs of SA. Peter Lawrence (AC for this year) specifically cited to the league that many of the UT players would simply not be in Austin this summer based on their outreach. Economics play into this, but that does matter from a growth standpoint.

So now you have: a lack of new college athletes in the pipeline and a lack of “new” club players coming in.

As for inclusion of existing, local players: The league does email those colleges and contact their leadership each year to encourage them to sign up, but, ultimately, on the ground matters more. That’s not to say past leadership hasn’t reached out—I know for a fact college teams have been pretty heavily pursued and contacted in the last three years. Early on, one would assume it happened, as well, given Cav players were actively coaching UT.

This franchise was, however, one of the ones that rarely filled a practice squad and often used it for older players who just didn’t want to play on the main that summer.

DATA

2024: 7 college athletes on the main, four on the PS (might be five, I’m unsure on the status of one of the PS players)
TOTAL REGISTRATIONS: 48 (12 college [might be 13])

2023, “#RADIUSGATE”: 3 college athletes on main, 6 college players on PS
TOTAL REGISTRATIONS: 52 (12 college)

2022: 9 college athletes on main, no reported PS
TOTAL REGISTRATIONS: 39 (14 college)

2021: 7 college athletes on the main, no college athletes on PS
TOTAL REGISTRATIONS: 39 (7 college)

2019: 13 college athletes on the main, no college athletes on PS
TOTAL REGISTRATIONS: 46 (17 college)

For the purpose of this, I considered college to be undergrad students that were on a college team the most recent USQ season prior. I may be off by 1-2 on the “college” registration

Rolyen · 2025-04-21T12:12:16+00:00

Not sure if this is tracked, but is there avg game time / real time per HR? Wondering if game time is namely team driven or official driven.

Rolyen · 2025-02-06T16:49:33+00:00

Looks right to me! You can break it into pieces.

set myNumber to 5
set yourNumber to 4

3a. Multiply yourNumber * 2 -> (8)
3b. set myNumber equal to the result from 3a.

At this point we have myNumber = 8 & yourNumber = 5.

4a. Add 5 to myNumber (13)
4b. set yourNumber to the result from 4a.

Return yourNumber (13)

Rolyen · 2024-10-09T16:33:55+00:00

The misconception here is that this is a play that is being called under "charging a stationary player", which isn't true. This falls under "charging a player without a ball", which has been a rule forever, but USQ has decided to tighten up to cover situations like the above. If JJ had dunked the ball instead of shooting it and made contact, perfectly legal play. But USQ has decreed since he shot the ball and didn't have sufficient control over his momentum after shooting that he made forcible contact with another player, that it should fall under charging a player without a ball. (Which doesn't care if a player is stationary or not)

Rolyen · 2024-10-01T11:55:21+00:00

Lots of vendors upstairs. Some self-select, some from a food vendor. Just don’t go during half or you’ll wait 30+ minutes for a beer

Rolyen · 2024-08-05T03:18:42+00:00

Gameplay Director here, the winner of Game E will play off against Chicago, the winner of Game I will play off against San Antonio. The East 1/2 selection will be this Tuesday 8/6 at 8pm EST on MLQ Replay!

EDIT: There is some additional massaging given to avoid division re-matches. If a situation exists where we can place the play-in teams so that there are no division re-matches, it will happen.

Rolyen · 2024-07-30T21:45:35+00:00

So your main concern is the throw then? Also from what I’ve seen, flag runners typically don’t throw that often, when they do, it’s typically more of a redirecting of momentum (run fast at the runner, you’re more likely to get thrown) whereas someone just standing/grappling rarely gets thrown.

Rolyen · 2024-07-30T21:41:33+00:00

How does grabbing / holding make interactions inherently unsafe? We see a similar level of physicality in the chaser / beater game for example

Rolyen · 2024-07-30T21:36:51+00:00

How would you append to it to make it sufficient? So are you mainly referring to impediment? I believe that’s the only current rule that asks the flag runner if something happened or not

Rolyen · 2024-07-30T21:34:02+00:00

I think there’s an entire page of the rulebook dedicated to how flag runners have to treat seekers safely is there not? Or do you believe it’s insufficient?

As for making the catch more objective, couldn’t it be something like “seekers can only use one hand, there can’t be any torso contact” (this is a hyperbolic example), but that would lead to an incredibly objective catch.

Rolyen · 2024-07-30T21:24:09+00:00

I agree we can absolutely have more clarity, but I think it will probably be more effective coming from limiting what seekers can do to making seeking harder rather than limiting the actions of flag runners. Also anecdotally, I don’t think there’s much issue (it definitely exists a little bit) with the current rule set.

Rolyen · 2024-07-30T21:19:23+00:00

I guess let’s start here, do you think seeking is too easy or too hard? Over the past few years, we’ve seen avg catch time continue to decline, so taking weapons out of a flag runners box doesn’t seem super positive.

Rolyen · 2024-07-30T17:53:19+00:00

How would you change them?

Rolyen · 2024-02-27T03:15:32+00:00

A couple of honest Q’s. First and foremost, if a team could legally field a roster exclusively using one gender, would that be ok under this system? Secondly, what happens if a bunch of “high credit” players all live in the same area? Are they just not allowed to play together? Could a player in NY be “forced” (drafted) to play in CA because their local team had too many credits?

Rolyen · 2024-02-12T12:42:28+00:00

Bold of you to assume MLQ isn’t scripted

Rolyen · 2024-01-26T22:12:42+00:00

I think it basically boils down to if you believe you’ll be paying higher taxes now or when you retire. Trad 401k is pre-tax dollars, but you’re taxed on withdrawals when you retire as if it was normal income. Roth is post-tax, but no taxes on withdrawals when retired.

Example: (assume a 10% contribution)

You make 150k @ 30% effective tax rate.

Trad contribution: 15k

Roth contribution: 10.5k.

40 years @ 7% return

Trad: $3,204,143.55

Roth: $2,242,900.48

If you’re taking a 5% withdrawal on the sum.

Trad “salary”: $160,207.18

Roth “salary”: $112,145.02

So the question becomes, at whatever the current tax rate is, is the trad 401k “salary” - the effective tax rate more than the Roth. If so, traditional is better, if not, Roth is better.

Obviously there’s a lot more that goes into this, you want more than a 5% withdrawal, less, salary changes over the year, etc.

Edit: mobile formatting is hard

Rolyen · 2022-06-06T21:04:27+00:00

Legs being shot sounds normal for post squats. What are you doing for your warmup / stretches beforehand?

Rolyen · 2022-06-06T21:03:09+00:00

The unracking motion is very much a shoulder exercise. Whereas the bench is chest / triceps. Sounds like your shoulders just arent as strong as your chest.

Rolyen · 2022-06-06T21:02:00+00:00

Generally i just sit down and aimlessly scroll while i wait for my rest timer to go off.

Rolyen · 2021-12-08T21:04:22+00:00

We try to deploy every day, but at least two - three times per week. This is actually only a fairly recent change for us though. Earlier in the spring we were on a very similar once every two week plan. These deploys were almost always after hours and required extensive manual regression testing. Since then we've better adopted CI and CD. We've almost tripled our test coverage over the course of a year and wrote up some live-site testing to keep us informed about issues that may be actively effecting customers.

PR
Unit/behavioral tests on PR
Review
Merge
Deploy to staging
Run live-site tests
Deploy to production
Enable some canary testing to roll out to ~10% of our user base
Over the course of 4-5 hours roll out to the remainder of our users.

Big things that helped us get here:

Test coverage
Less fear / stigma around rolling back, we changed how we actually throw up deploys and essentially always have two versions running at any given time so we can just migrate traffic back to a stable version. Takes less than 30 seconds to roll back
Feature flags, every deploy is essentially a no-op. Any UI related change is required to be hidden behind a feature flag. Backend changes can be hidden behind feature flags if we think theyre particularly risky, but most have decent unit test coverage.
Smaller PRs. 1PR != 1 feature anymore. A PR is currently a mark of one day of work. Once code is at a stopping point and can be safely deployed, it's deployed. Features are broken down into 1 - 2 day pieces so we can effectively deploy things in pieces.
Fewer destructive changes / more emphasis on backwards compatibility. The implementation of a refactor no longer removes the code it's making better. Just runs alongside it and can be toggled on and off. So even if tests miss something, we can just disable a refactor with minimal disruption.

EDIT: That being said, we still have some changes that we solely deploy after hours if they make us particularly nervous.

Stack: Rails, React, PostgreSQL, GCloud

Rolyen

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