I was asked to be part of the SCHRS Technical Committee near the end of 2015 and agreed to help. Since I'm new to the process, I still have a lot to learn about what goes into the model and how ratings are produced and adjusted; however there were a couple of items that I think are useful in this discussion.

- SCHRS is actively managed, a lot of data is gathered, compiled and analyzed in order to validate current ratings and develop changes
- The process to update ratings is very methodical; both the reasons for, and the impact of changes are analyzed and reviewed by the committee prior to being finalized
- When changes occur, they are done via small, incremental steps so as to avoid "knee jerk" reactions and over corrections while continuing to move everyone closer to the middle

The document that I reviewed was very thorough in its analysis, explanations of changes, reasons for the proposed changes and contained plenty of supporting documentation. I would argue that they are doing a very good job of fairly rating boats in such a way as to provide the most level playing field possible. They have a model and are using statistical analysis of race data to validate the model and make minor changes as necessary... Are there outliers? Probably, but you're going to find that anywhere.

At the end of the day though, I think this is a more sound approach than the 100% statistical analysis approach of DPN. There would likely be little for the USSA to do in order to adopt SCHRS; heck, it might save some time and money to adopt this system as there would no longer be a need for the effort which is currently put into DPN. Additionally, from a statistical perspective, you now have a larger data set to work against; by increasing the width and depth of the data, the confidence goes up and the model gets better.