Southwest flies only to selected large cities. The average college town, and even such major cities as Boston, need to fly with a full-fare airline. So far it's been made known that Princeton, Illinois, and Harvard will have enormous difficulties getting to the event. I hope a field devoid of several contenders is something that NAQT and the tournament hosts work to avoid. I agree that finding 40 teams to show up will not be hard, but those teams being the best 40 from sectionals seems unlikely. In the past, NAQT has always paired a commitment to the integrity and quality of their tournaments from the perspective of the good of quizbowl with their business interests, and I hope this practice does not end with any sort of dismissive, "we'll make our money either way" attitude. I have not seen any such idea from any NAQT reps, but some are apparently eager to put those words into NAQT's mouth, and they appear to fit. I did a quick check of prices from several major Eastern air hubs. Los Angeles is on average $150 more expensive per person than a central city such as Chicago or St. Louis. The situation is more severe for teams in less populous areas. I don't think that the circuit is obligated to make the California teams the beneficiaries of geography. All the currently active CA teams are found in the greater San Francisco or Los Angeles areas; they do not have to deal with the struggle to get to a major airport that a Penn State or Cornell does. Many east coast teams will have a much more difficult time attending this event than any west coast teams had last year, and the number affected will be much higher. I await hearing the rationale for this decision as well as that for disregarding the other bids. There are lots of things that NAQT might have already done to alleviate the problems that we may not know about, and I'm hoping some of them have already been arranged. --M.W. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Faith Hill - Exclusive Performances, Videos & More http://faith.yahoo.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0: Sat 12 Feb 2022 12:30:46 AM EST EST