Tournament scheduling

etchuck · Sat, 09 Sep 2000 06:24:34 -0700

Pretty much concurring with Kenny, it's been very
difficult to plan a schedule with so many tournaments
moving in and out of weekends. I know when I hear of a
tournament, I make an effort to note that comp on the CWRU
2000-2001 events tour and let the guys on the team
eventually decide which events to attend if there is a
conflict. This year, our freshman class response has also
made us think about sending second teams to a handful
of tournaments (since we would easily bust our
budget if we went to them all).

Yes, rescheduling
an event is fairly traumatic (as many of us know
doubt have experienced :) ). You do have to pick a good
date where you know you have the facilities available
on site. Some of us also try to accommodate other
teams' schedules and tournaments, and we usually try to
communicate with those schools before setting up our own
schedule if it would make a difference in picking a date.
I know we can't help it if our tournament conflicts
with YOUR favorite football game or homecoming or
parents' weekend; we just do our best to accommodate
everyone.

To that end, the shrinking number of weekends to do
competitions is one reason why I put up a proposed
announcement for a competition our organization wants to do in
APRIL... the last weekend in April. We knew the factors
going into it on our end: last weekend of classes
before finals and reading period, CB Nationals if we
were ever so lucky, and rehabbing from other national
comps. We still have to see whether our campus will let
us run this event so close to finals, but we have to
wait a few months to figure that out (and
unfortunately no sooner).

But for us, it is our
intention to run one college tournament (really a
double-tournament) that semester and hopefully on that weekend. As
we have done in the past with our other events, we
do not expect to reschedule our tournament after we
announce it officially, and if it makes it that much
easier for teams to attend, great. But we also expect
feedback to tell us whether we're just doing all this
planning in vain, that there are other tournaments you'd
rather attend, you have exams to study for, or you have
better things to do. We don't want to go into all this
planning to find out we're only going to get 4 teams,
because cancelling the tournament for that reason will
look bad on us even if it's not our fault.

I
only hope that what we're trying to do in hosting our
first-ever conventional qb tournament will result in a good,
competitive, and enjoyable weekend of competition... something
that our team would be proud of perpetuating in the
near future. 

In summary, I think the best
thing to do to avoid frustration in this fluidity of
scheduling tournaments is really to plan ahead. If you can
poll around the teams that you think might be
interested in coming to see if that weekend is good, please
go ahead; it helps our organization plan for events
for next semester (which consequently we are seeing
fill up as early as a year ahead of time). But I also
am beginning to think that this saturation claiming
of weekends is going to make it more difficult for
newer programs to claim good weekends to run
tournaments, and in the long run, that's not good for any of
us.