In a March 29, 2021 revision to the racing rules, US Sailing introduced the "Scoring-Low Point Averaged System" and recommended it for scoring of long series of races. The Average-Place Scoring system, as proposed below, is an implementation of that rule.
The Average-Place is a simpler alternative to the Cox-Sprague system. Like the Cox-Sprague system, it only scores races in which the boat has started, allowing it to contend for series awards without the need to compete in every race. Unlike the Cox-Sprague scoring system, the Average-Place system uses the Low-Point System scores currently used to score most regattas. That makes the season scores consistent with the scoring used for the individual regattas and thus more intuitive and easy to understand. The Average-Place system is easy to implement as it uses only the Excel average() function without the need to use any tables or user defined functions.
The Average-Place score for a race series is the average of the boat's finishing places in all the races it started. The lowest score wins.
Did not finish (DNF) and Disqualified (DSQ) are scored as the number of starters plus one. Did not Start (DNS) and Did not Compete (DNC) are not scored.
When the number of participants does not vary significantly from race to race, the Average-Place system returns rankings that are very similar to the rankings produced by the Cox-Sprague system.
An Excel based Average-Place Calculator computes Average-Place scores for each boat given the boat's results and the number of discards.
The calculator spreadsheet contains a template for scoring of a race series.