I certainly agree with Dave Murphy and others who have said, just organize more fundraisers. To pour a bit of reality cold-water on this... (1) Running college tournaments. Right now not too many people want to do it or are obviously having major difficulties scheduling events. The Duke team supposedly polled teams to see if anyone wanted to have a JB tournament in early October, and no one replied yes or no. We are hosting TRASH Regionals, and while I have enough space for 16 teams, I think I can count 3 teams playing (in other words, I'd like a few more teams). We aren't asking teams to submit questions either, which is an additional level of difficulty and complexity added. Quite frankly, if everyone ran a college tournament, great. I think we'd all love the additional practice. The fact is ... (skip to bottom). (2) Running high school tournaments. In my tenures at CWRU and currently at Duke we run some pretty good high school tournaments on the basis of attendance and competitiveness of field (in my humble but completely biased opinion). However, this did not occur overnight. It took a lot of effort and a lot of stress either getting questions done or getting all the logistics ready. Yes, NAQT is a great resource to purchase questions for your event; I even encourage question-sharing for high school events if you don't use NAQT questions. But few teams have the manpower or logistics to run a 64-team event well. Furthermore, you cannot reasonably charge high school teams the same amount you charge college teams because ... (skip to bottom) (3) Going to administration. Especially for a prestigious national tournament in your eyes, you have to find a way to convince admins that it's worth going. Programs with Honors Colleges like Chicago or a sustained support by administration generally have no problems, but most schools out there have student activities advisors who really don't have a clue and if it's not College Bowl (shudder), it's not worth funding a trip out there, especially without chaperones. You'll probably have to go through insurance and waivers too. That's nothing though, in comparison to making sure you have the financial backing of people at the school. But that does take a lot of effort in an area that not many students really have any confidence or experience in. Regardless of that... <bottom> Here's the bottom line: the current economic climate is one where I don't see that many people getting funded for that many trips. That affects the number of teams that I can get to competitions (high school or college) and thus the amount of money we can get in our events. I seldom look at competitions that I run and expect to break even in my first year or two. I am sure that we lost money hosting MLK Jr in January. The important part for us is that there was an opportunity to play. Non sequitor meant to raise controversy because there isn't enough here: [That being said, I'm not sure that there is enough interest in the community (at least down here in the Southeast here) to play, or that there is enough time to get enough games in for the teams to play while worrying about how to get money. So far as I can tell, most of the teams down here seem to have difficulty logistically with getting to competitions unless they're going to Chattanooga. Certainly the community that was here 10+ years ago no longer exists, and that has resulted in both the lack of quality play down here and the lack of interest in playing it appears. I don't mind that; I have a life and a career to develop, but it's so sad to see that no one really wants to do anything for the circuit here. Charlie and I cannot fight these battles forever, especially when it's so hard when our team cannot go to Chattanooga or conversely because of our tournament scheduling or logistics.] Running college tournaments is not a fundraiser for the most part; it's usually a money pit black hole if you account the number of hours of editing and effort per team attending. High school tournaments are better as fundraisers because you can get more teams in the field and use resources better, but many of the schools can only go if they can afford to. But you better make sure you can run a good tournament or be willing to learn how to; thinking that running tournaments is a cash cow is completely the wrong attitude. The student budgets for clubs at least at the two institutions here are getting smaller; for UNC (I'm not the team's advisor, but I know this from my activities with another student club on campus), it's due to state government cuts... for Duke, who knows but I suspect it's the fact our endowment has crashed with the stock market as every other private institution's endowments and alumni contributions. For Duke, we are holding a high school comp next weekend as well as our traditional winter tournament. And even with that, we still may not have enough money to go. The final thing is a question of where to set one's priorities with the limited funds one has. I intend to use the trip to NAQT ICT as a reward for the people on the Duke team, provided they qualify either in D1 or D2. However, is the experience of going to ICT going to be worthwhile for the team if four people go and leave the rest of 12 people behind? Each team has to consider its own members when making this decision, and I suspect that is the real crux of the problem. For many programs, we may have enough money to go, but is the trip worth it? I may say it is, but have the kids on the team earned the trip based on whatever track record they have accumulated at other tournaments or helping out at our fundraisers? That to me is equally important because you really don't want people to just suck out resources and never put anything back in. I have checked some airfares, and for the weekend of ICT, I don't think that the discounted fares apply (at least not that I've seen). That shouldn't matter so much because I'm sure there is a sale that comes up every 3 months anyway. But, I hope that the timing of the announcement of teams that are invited to ICT coincides with the air fare sales. I suspect that they will, as they have the past few years. And quite frankly, I hope that the ICT at UCLA will be as successful as all the past tournaments NAQT has held.
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