OK, I'll bite. What else should we be doing to attract (and keep) Division II teams? This is not a rhetorical question. We're a small state school ourselves, surrounded by lots of potential Division II teams, and I'll take any specific advice you have to offer. But bear in mind there's an economic side to this debate too. Believe it or not, for the first time in the 35 tournaments we've hosted since 1997, UTC lost money on the ACF Fall Tournament. This is directly related to what was done to attract Division II teams -- leading to lower revenues per team (thanks to cut rates for novice teams) and higher trophy expense. Mind you, we're still glad we hosted it -- it sets a good precedent for next year, and what we lost is only about what we'd have paid as the entry fee for one team. Just for the record, here's what we did at UTC to attract Division II teams to the ACF Fall Midsouth. The first two were specifically at ACF's behest; the other two we did on our own, but I suspect most if not all other host schools did similarly. 1) We had separate Division II awards, standard practice for UTC's independent tournaments but a first for ACF. 2) New teams (from schools not at ACF Regionals or Nationals the past two years) were exempted from packet submission and given a rate of $50. (If anyone has seen a cheaper rate offered for a nationally affiliated collegiate tournament, I'd love to hear about it.) 3) We expanded the number of individual All-Stars in each division, with trophies of course. 4) We e-mailed invitations directly to the many junior colleges, CBCI-only schools, and other smaller programs in our area and talked the tournament up at COTKU, where Division II teams abounded. What else could we be doing that we aren't?
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