After a season where 77 teams and over a thousand riders participated in the Zwift Club Ladder, we are gearing up for the autumn and winter season. But what of the season that is now just wrapping up?
First Season Notes
One of the biggest changes over the season was the introduction of a “global league”, so rather than segregating teams strictly by region, everyone has a global and regional rank, and can choose to race cross-timezone if they wish. For many, this is the first opportunity to see how they compare against competition from other continents after being kept separated in other Zwift competitions.
It’s been an exciting battle all through the table, with many teams taking scalps of significantly higher-ranked teams, showing that ranks are “just a number.”
As we move into the final week of the summer competition, Team SZ are sitting pretty atop the Global and EMEA rankings while Eat DIRT Nonstop are top in APAC. Further down the rankings we’ve got to give a shout-out to SRT Stockholm who, as a Ruby-ranked team, have beaten several top Diamond-ranked teams. Meanwhile, Rhinos continue to dominate the middle rankings, with Rampaging sitting way above their Platinum-ranked competition and White Rhinos smashing all comers in Gold. In APAC, the positions have stayed more in line with the original ranks, aside from WMZ Bees, who have found themselves in 2nd place despite their much lower Emerald ranking.
(If you don’t know your Emeralds from your Diamonds then head on over to zwiftracing.app to read a little bit more about the results-based category system that we have used for ladder.)
For the last week of this season we have some even more exciting racing in store, with teams doing a double header of races: two short, sharp races in an hour to give the ladder a final shake-up before we head into a short break before autumn season starts.
Coming Up
Talking of autumn, what do we have in store?
The ladder will run continuously through autumn/winter, but will be broken up into 3 seasons with a very short break between each for team admin. Each season will start and end on a Tuesday, with each of these start and end dates being mandatory race dates and teams having a free choice of races at other times:
- 5th September- 31st October
- 7th November- 2nd January
- 9th January- 27th February
The flexible nature of ladder racing means clubs should be able to fit this racing quite nicely alongside other races they want to do, or go full-on with ladder focus and race multiple times a week.
What else is new for next season? The biggest news is that we finally have an American league up and running! Currently, we have 10 teams signed up on an EST time zone, but room for plenty more. It’s great to finally see us spreading out to the Americas.
We are also working on some exciting opportunities around race streaming and race formats, which aren’t quite ready for announcement yet but hopefully help the league go from strength to strength as the season progresses.
Join In
To give you more of a flavor of the ladder, why not check out a couple of races in action?
You can also head over to the league website (ladder.cycleracing.club) to check out the current standings and upcoming fixtures.
Think you fancy it for yourself? Entry for the upcoming season is now open. We’re not going to lie, the series does put an onus on team captains for admin and organization, so first please do read the race book to find out what’s involved.
Read all that and want to come to battle? The deadline to get involved for the start of this coming season is 29th August, so please get signed up. If you miss this date then we’ll place you on a waiting list for inclusion partway through the season.
Questions or Comments?
Post below!
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