I still don’t see any logical rationale to give up these spots. Less teams get to compete. Less teams get to earn points. Less teams get opportunities to make themeselves known to the judges.
By all appearances, all teams that will likely meet the ISU's mandate for minimum scores to compete at the Junior World level. (Ling & Wein, Tkachenko & Kiliakov, and Wolfkostin & Chen having already done so).
I’m not sure how anyone can defend this decision when there is no obvious reasoning behind it.
Probably they'll say that teams didn't earn the required scores early enough. But Lake Placid--which is where DelCamp & Somerville earned their ISP scores--has always been early enough for teams to nail down early JGP dance berths in the past. As far as we could tell, the Browns earned theirs at Lake Placid last season.
I think it's not good that it was held a week later this year.
Even so, if you have been paying attention to the U.S. junior dance field at all over the past several years, then you knew that Somerville & Wein had more JGP experience than the entire rest of the U.S. junior dance field so it was common sense to anticipate that their new partnerships might make the ISP by the end of the summer. And it's also common sense to think that brand new teams might need a few competitions in order to do so.
It would not have been that difficult. It would have made perfectly logical sense to put the Browns up against Cesanek & Yehorov in Latvia and send Ales & Tsarik along with their teammates, Wolfkostin & Chen, to Russia. Thereby opening up a spot in Poland for a late qualifying team. Even just putting in Tkachenko & Kiliakov or Lavrova & Gart as a placeholder early would have allowed someone to be moved into the field in Latvia.
I know. I said I had moved on. And I have.
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