UK Ultimate,
Firstly I want to thank the Organizers of Tour 1 for doing such a
great job despite some pretty bad conditions. There were some flaws
in the tournament, but getting 36 Mixed teams to travel to York the
first weekend of April is pretty impressive, in my humble opinion.
I also want to apologize to for being short-handed in terms of women
(yes, we had 3 women). It was very stressful in the run-up to the
tournament, but I don't think we hurt the tournament or the game of
Ultimate by being in this situation. In the future I hope that the
women on our team avoid injury before tournaments, but I can't really
predict this. On the plus side, one of our women was a beginner,
played every point, and absolutely loved it. We are continuing
recruitment of women for Mixed and London Summer League as well.
Sorry for the bad timing at York, but I would like to refute the
suggestion that we are just a men's team who threw in some ladies so
we could compete at Mixed Tour.
As for scheduling, I commend the TD's decision to prevent people from
having long breaks in the cold conditions. Let's not forget that we
were very lucky, as it didn't rain that much during the day. At
London WL4, we had cold, wet conditions all day long, and our team
for one was forced to endure two separate 1hr breaks. Standing on the
sidelines soaking wet and freezing cold for that long is not safe or
healthy, and should be avoided. It's a delicate balance, but one I
think the York people handled properly.
Also, as the 33rd seed entering York, I was quite please to see we
were playing on a cricket outfield. It may not have been lined, but I
was impressed that the TD's didn't relegate the lower seeds to the
worst pitches. Of course, I can't say that the cricket purists on our
team weren't a little upset by it, but such is life.
Looking forward to London,
Matt D.
Message: 5
Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2006 22:55:59 +0100
From: David Grayson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [BD] mixed tour 1 scheduling!!
To: Britdisc <[email protected]>
Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
Hi Si and others,
It is true that some (one?) team had to play 5 games back to back at
MT1. The reason for this is as follows:
1. The tournament was over subscribed and we had to make a choice as to
whether to reject teams or to change the schedule to include all teams. We
chose the latter.
2. This was a Tour 1. Seeding the tournament was undoubtedly going to be
problematic given the large changes between teams in the mixed division
from one year to the next. We decided to do a schedule which was as open
as realistically possible, in order to dull the effect of the seeding
process.
The downside was that we knew that it was possible that teams would have to
play 3 matches in a row, some would almost certainly play 4 in a row
(though it depended on results) and it was possible that teams could have
to play 5 in a row if results were to fall a particular way.
Some of our expectations were as follows:
We felt that since games had been shortened (only an hour rather than
100mins in the Open Tour) fatigue per game was less of an issue than it may
appear.
With the fairly open style of tournament it was expected that some games
would be shorter than an hour, as we expected some games to be fairly one
sided.
The weather was expected to be unseasonably cold, and it was decided that
players would prefer to play reasonably close back to back games rather
than be hanging around for a moderate amount of time (not long enough to
recover but long enough for the body to cool down, thus increasing the
chance of injury).
Unfortunately, but not necessarily expectedly, the weather was very windy
and games tended to overrun a lot with some very long caps being played,
this led to games being longer than expected.
So thats what we knew before the tournament. We had to make some decisions
and I stand by all of them made as being for the good of the tournament and
for the good of all the players at the tournament. Maybe with hindsight it
would have been better to make different decisions and have prevented teams
from playing or lowering the amount of pitch time for teams at the
tournament but I think there are good reasons for expecting that this
would have led to a different set of complaints. I'm happy to let people
debate the issues but I can assure you that all decisions were made with
the best interests of UK Ultimate at heart.
As it is, we did our best at the tournament, right down to personally
giving teams that I heard of playing 5 in a row some free bananas to stave
off cramp. A small gesture perhaps, but I hoped it was a nice one!
If you or anyone else has any further feedback regarding the tournament
then please feel free to either email me directly or pass it on to the
DoC. All feedback is taken into account when considering future bids.
I hope this answers some of your questions,
Dave.
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