Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Paranoia setting in for CCA web-heads

I was forwarded an e-mail train by Lynn Hunt, who wrote to the CCA to ask why the new website didn’t include the records and stats section that was on the previous site. Glenn van Gulik, the Manager of Information Technology responded as follows:
While I understand your desire to be able to view the records and statistics that we have accumulated, the decision to temporarily remove them from our website was made by our Manager of High Performance in light of the upcoming Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Access to that type of information to international competitors without our ability to access that information about their teams forced the decision to be made.

Aha! So there are spies perusing the CCA web site, looking for ways to locate the Achilles’ Heel of our as-of-yet unnamed/undecided Olympic representatives. I can’t say I was a regular viewer of the stats that appeared on the old Web site – in fact, I can’t even remember them being there. But let’s say there were the regular game reports from the national championships. They include such things as win-loss, in-turns-out-turns, etc. Perhaps there’s some things that could be gleaned from that info, but let’s be serious here: Do you really think the Chinese or the New Zealand teams are going to be pouring over year-old records to look for a weakness in Glenn Howard’s team, for example?
And if this info was of some use, wouldn’t it make more sense to buy a copy of the Black Book of Curling where it appears in far more detail? (or have they never heard of Google Cache?) I can understand trying to get an edge, but this is just pure paranoia.

1 comment:

Dean Gemmell said...

That's rich. In order to keep, say, Don Walchuk's shooting percentage at the '88 Brier away from prying foreign eyes, they take away the sport's history. It would be difficult to imagine the PGA Tour denuding its web site of statistics to prevent giving the Europeans an advantage in the Ryder Cup. This seems even less well-thought than some of the cresting decisions over the years.