Here is a list of how the Region 9 CBI tournament was the worst thing to his the circuit since....since...whatever the worst thing before it was. 1. The tournament schedule was not mailed to the teams until 2 days before the competition, which compunded many of the later problems. 2. There was little e-mail contact between the tournament director and the teams. I had to prod to get information and even then it was not quick in coming, if the tournament director knew at all. 3. We were told to get hotel rooms the night before, and led to believe there was some check-in procedure. The check-in that went on was us getting our copies of the elegibility forms back and getting our stupid CBI coffee mugs. This surely could have been done at check-in on Saturday and saved us the cost. 4. The tournament (which was 11 teams strong) did not have a round-robin format. Instead, there existed 2 brackets (one of 6 teams, one of 5), who played round-robin bewtten the other teams in the bracket, and never played anyone from the other bracket. What this does is A: It allows for very few games played and a poor way of deciding the two teams that made the best 2-of-3 finals at the end of the day. B: Some teams payed $750 or more to be there ($600 entry fee for returning teams, plus $30 per team member). Therefore, even if you were in the bracket that got to play more games, you payed the equivalent of no less than $150 PER GAME. Anyone who thinks this is getting their money's worth is nuts. C: Teams in the same bracket that had equal or better records than the teams in the other bracket hasd NO CHANCE of making the finals, due to the poor set-up. For example, DePauw had a record that probably would have put us in the top of the other bracket and in the finals, but since we were in the A bracket, we had no shot. 5. Changes in the format were refused, even after I sent the tournament director a new schedule. Here excuses were as follows: I. There were not enough packets. This results due to bad planning. She claimed that she and her cohort from Valparaiso had worked hours to get things ready. When we hosted our SCT 2 Saturdays ago, it tooks WEEKS to put together and see that it ran smoothly. Had we not been ready to go on game day, then we could not have taken care of the little snafus that normally occur during the day. II. Volunteers were hard to come by. This could not possibly be the case, as every team, by CBI rules, is required to bring a faculty sponsor, and they were able to draw no less than 7-10 Valpo volunteers to staff. This provides more than enough people for 5 rooms of competition, under ANY circumstances. III. She mis-interpreted the time constraints of the rounds. Had we decided not to waste time with rounds that were allocated 45 or 30 minutes (including not letting competitors leave until a verbal go-ahead was given, and rounds not starting until everyone was ready to go), we could easily have gotten through a lot more rounds. IV. "This is the way it has been done in past years." This is indicative of the TOTAL LACK OF THOUGHT given to changing things for the better. Instead, our tournament director (who I do not name, just out of some strange courtesy, but whose name you could undoubtedly find on the CBI website) decided to just let the poor format go and not ask anyone about to play what they thought would be a good way to go, despite the fact she has obviously never done this before. Even when I offered my advice as a 2-time TD, she dis-regarded it and was even very snippy with me.
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