I do know who wrote this post (#7430), and I think the example he's using is way off. The team he's referring to, which scored 675 while giving up 3455, was an all-freshman team from New College, and I think some of the four players were in their first tournament of any kind. They were nice kids, and they were having fun when I met them. Besides, they had at least two close matches. In any case, they had a couple of promising players, and I suspect they will be back at the next available tournament. Second ... 40-year-old professional students? True, some of us are moderately fossilized, but even among the top scorers at the Florida tournament, none of us has been consistently playing for more than the last three or four years. I wasn't aware that you thought of me as a "grognard" ... whatever that may be. It's not often that I get to play in a tournament only 275 miles away, so when the opportunity arises, I go. Besides that, it was your team hosting the tournament -- if you felt that strongly about protecting those younger teams from taking so many pummelings, your team could have organized the tournament differently. That has nothing to do with ACF. Furthermore, as the stats guy, you know that (if div II is restricted to players in their first two years of competition) only 3 or 4 teams would have even qualified for Div II -- that too has nothing to do with ACF. That reminds me of a point which has been offered up by a couple of people about a "lack of comeraderie," etc. I've got to tell you that I haven't seen this behaviour at all, not to any substantial degree. Maybe it's just a regional thing, but from my experience (mostly in the Southeast, but occasionally elsewhere too), rudeness seems to be more the exception than the rule. But getting back to my first point, I was there and did hear the questions, and frankly, I think the teams near the bottom seemed to be having a good time. I think the statements of ACF "treating young players like crap" are totally unfounded, especially in light of the regional and fall sets edited by Subash and Kelly. --Raj Dhuwalia
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