An interesting day on Britdisc! Thought I'd chip in on a few points spread over a bunch of topics from the last week...
Back to back (b2b) games in schedules - I'm pretty sure everybody was much happier to play b2b games on Saturday thanks to the weather, but it's still debatable whether the majority prefer b2b to extra warm-up / warm-downs under normal conditions. The scheduling group can't really be expected to produce two schedules and choose one based on the weather forecast, so perhaps b2b's are the safer option. As a side note, the schedules come out just a few days before the event because pretty much without fail, a team will drop out on the Tues/Weds before any Tour, and it's not fair to punish other teams with walkovers because of it. Spirit - I liked Benji's post last week about how rarely calls should end up as contested, and how the teams should always try hard to work them out instead. I think the UK has great spirit compared to what I've seen at Euro/World tournaments in the last few years, where sometimes any kind of discussion about a call rattles the sideline into yelling "If it's contested it goes back!" or some other nonsense. Score-wise, giving each team a mark out of 10, assuming each team is 10 unless you find otherwise, and then drawing an average for each team at the end rather than a total seems to make sense. Scoring games - it would be a big waste of player-volunteers' time to sit scoring games at Tour... that time could be much better spent researching into potential venues, organising ladder league games, or even putting ultimate rules+local team flyers with frisbees in the shops in town. The idea to get a third party involved such as the Scouts is possibly genius - though not many venues have gazebos+chairs for every pitch at the moment. Sounds like some coordination would be needed so each TD doesn't have to cold-call the local scout group, instead somebody within the national scout network could coordinate + work it out as they went along. This would undoubtedly lead to loads more junior players - the Brighton juniors have been hooked since they saw a mention of Brighton Beyond in a local newspaper & came to watch the tournament. My understanding is that scouts do stuff either to raise funds or to earn badges, so there would likely be a cost involved, but I can't imagine any cheaper way of finding ~200 hours volunteer time, plus they get to do something interesting, useful, in a position of responsibility (though not really because they players will notice any mistakes)... C Tour - the development group discussed the best next step for Tour a few months back, and after much debate pretty much everybody agreed that regionalisation would be the most sensible step. So, venues providing, the A+W Tours remain as they are, but the B Tour is split North/South, with no restrictions on which venue teams have to go to, and each B Tour winner qualifies for the next A Tour. Note that this was just the product of discussion of a group of volunteers, nothing officially UKUA, and no official recommendation to be submitted to whoever makes the decision or anything has been drafted yet, so don't panic. From a scheduler's point of view, the number of fields for each event this year was just about right, and could accomodate almost everyone (a small waiting list wasn't bad because it meant dropouts could be replaced, rather than rewriting the schedule), but we should plan to accomodate more teams next year. With a B Tour in the North+South, more teams are also likely to participate due to ease of transport. Effectively after this move we'd have 4 tournaments to run each Tour date - 16A, ~16W, ~16B(N) ~16B(S) - some of these can be combined to make 2x32 team tournaments etc, depending on the venues available to us. Whether this move is needed all depends on the availability of 22 pitch venues... More bids+venues are definitely needed either way - I think the UKUA should go down the same road as Uni and Indoors, and publicise when bids are received for each event, so the public know which events still need bids and when they should be prepared if they are to stand a chance of suceeding. C Tour I don't see much point in until it's held in a different location - instead the B Tour could be fully peer-pooled. In fact, if we're constantly holding the A and B Tours in the same place, it'd be simpler from a schedulers point of view for them to just be in one big peer-pool system, which gets broken apart if and when the A/B Tours get hosted at different venues. Felix __________________________________________________ BritDisc mailing list [email protected] http://www.fysh.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/britdisc Staying informed - http://www.ukultimate.com/staying-informed
