One year ago, the UPCL suffered a massive data loss due to hard drive failure. It was a devastating blow for the league, but not a knockout punch by any means. At first, the pure size of the task at hand, which I called Reconstruction, was almost unbearable. I took it in pieces, grabbing what I could out of personal correspondence, archived data on this site, and memory. Two of the documents I lost were the Career Matchups and the Record Book. I decided to tackle the Record Book first. Using the original 2010 Tournament document, and digital copies from 2011 and 2012, I was able to lay the groundwork for a new document, the Guidebook, which streamlines many of the functions found in the old record book. This took about two weeks to work on, but it paled in comparison to the next stage: full document reconstruction.
It became clear to me quickly that some things were just gone for good from the 2014-2016 documents. Qualifying data was completely lost, as was most of the preseason work. This didn't bother me much, as it isn't essential to the league. I still had some raw numbers from 2016 to work with going forward, which would be built upon later. Instead, after rebuilding the 2017 document, I decided to lay the framework in reverse. I connected the dots from 2012's UPCL teams origin to where the players are now, in 2017, and filled in the rest for the other years. With that done, I worked on a much larger task. Three years' worth of brackets to reconstruct, and then the corresponding records to balance on the standings pages. Not helping matters was a busy schedule from August to December, which kept me away from both Reconstruction and the progression of the much easier-to-recover fourth Cricket document. In fact, throughout the Reconstruction period, only two weeks of the cricket season were played.
I got done with the last single-year document reconstruction in October, and then took on the Herculean task of rebuilding the Career Matchups document. This took about another 6 weeks, and while I tried to be as good as possible with it, the document itself is technically not accurate. I want to take another look at it in the near future, but I'm not totally sure it can be fixed to correspond accurately with the other materials. It is more meant to be a fun document that shows which players have met before. The Guidebook is the official source for all other player data, which is what matters the most.
With the Reconstruction complete in December, it was time to rectify two things: the slow pace of the cricket season, and the significantly delayed start to the Tournament qualifying session. The Heart of the Game 8-ball Doubles Tournament covered part of November and December, and by the end of it, qualifiers were set to begin. However, loss would strike again, as my grandmother passed away after a weeks-long fight in February. This disheartened me quite a bit, putting another six-week delay in the Tournament process, for most of the start of the year. The first round featured long breaks between game days, and Cricket saw another reduction in the pace of the season. However, since the end of March, things have run smoothly throughout, bringing us to today. The league documents for next year are just about ready to go, and with the return of old players and another large rookie class entering, it should be an exciting time. I'll have another announcement in a few weeks regarding some big changes to the league structure, but until then, it's the last three rounds of the Tournaments and six more league-weeks of Cricket play before the Hutton Cup Playoffs. I didn't know if this year's events would even get done, but it's clearer than ever that they will, and the league is set to continue for as long as I want it.
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