I try not to get involved in this stuff, but a couple of years ago someone suggested we split the tour and play at seperate venues... Seriously though, players want to play at venues like Cardiff, Birmingham, Eastbourne etc with flat pitches and nice modern facilities, free on-site camping and local hotel options (I'm sure there are others but those were the first that came to mind) However, the tour seems to now be too big for many of those venues and (I expect) those venues are too expensive to accomodate only the A tour for £180 per team and still generate enough worthwhile profit for the TD. How would people feel about more expensive tournments? I doubt it would go down too well (especially if A tour teams felt 'forced' to pay a high fee and B tour teams ended up playing at cheaper venues), but I for one would be willing to pay an extra £10 players' fee (based on a doubling of tourney fee to £360 per team and 18 players) to guarantee showers, food, toilets, medical staff, shelter, properly marked pitches, parking, party, non-cramped schedule etc. Please don't flame me too hard Luke (FoL #18) PS I actually think Anthony and his team did a pretty good job for first timers and will learn from the experience. It certainly wasn't even close to being the worst event I've been to (I won't name names but there was a B tour event a couple of years ago that provoked some much more severe discussion) but then again I was lucky enough to play on pitches 1 & 2 all weekend which were OK if a little hard underfoot.
--- On Mon, 8/6/09, UKU Director of Competitions <[email protected]> wrote: From: UKU Director of Competitions <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [BD] A list of questions about Tour 1 To: "Sion Scone" <[email protected]>, "brit disc" <[email protected]> Date: Monday, 8 June, 2009, 2:51 PM Brummie, Here's an explanation of some of the points you raise. Things could have been done better in places, and we'll try and learn from the things that didn't go so well, but hopefully I'll be able to answer some of your queries. This will be a long one. > > 1 - If the format for Tour 1 is so open, what was the point in Tour 0? > Tour 0 as a seeding tournament might work in principle, but if you > divvy into North/South then you create a new problem that needs fixing > at Tour 1. Tour 0 should never have happened - what a waste of > effort. > Tour 0 was not deliberately split. It was split because of the paucity of bids (i.e. zero) that were able to host it in one place. This appears to have been because it fell in the football season and many venues were unavailable. We'll take this on board. But once it was split, we had little choice but to open the format a little at T1. That there were a number of significant moves up and down shows that this was worth doing - it may also seem to you to show that T0 was pointless, but that is something we could not have predicted when the original plan, to host a single combined T0, was made. Should we have cancelled Tour 0 completely? Or would most people be happier with the way that we tried to adjust to the circumstances when we had no bids? > 2 - Its commonly said that the "big teams" shouldn't have to play at > Tour 0 because its "a waste of their time". For the second year in a > row, one of the teams that didn't need to go to Tour 0 dropped a > significant number of places (for whatever reason). My point is that > perhaps it should be considered that those "big clubs" aren't as > stable as people assume, and that other teams are closing the gap. > Throw in things like Fire having evenly split squads and things become > less predictable still. Basically, if we're going to have a seeding > tournament then every team needs to be there. > There were originally two reasons for the top teams being exempt. One is that many top players (i.e. those playing big post-season GB and international tournaments) complained of tiredness over a long season. The other, and to me more important, reason was that running a completely open format for a large number of teams is a big problem, and any excuse to run it with fewer is worth grabbing. Top teams have been exempt from T0 for the past couple of years for precisely this reason. This reason is meaningless when we have a split T0 and therefore plenty of room - but again, the split happened quite late on. The top 4 were expecting an exemption, and could very well have planned their pre-season accordingly, so we decided not to force them to go to T0. They were offered the chance, and had we known earlier about the Fire situation (we did find out before T0, but very late) then we would have forced them to send both their teams to T0. > 3 - Who wrote that schedule, and who approved that venue? Why were > some teams playing first and last game on Saturday? With a 9am start > and a 7.30pm finish, add in warmup / warmdown time and we were on the > fields for 12 hours. That's a ridiculously long time. Luckily it > didn't rain too much and it wasn't freezing cold; but it could have > been. There was ZERO shelter and the only facilities I saw were > portaloos. There was inadequate parking which resulted in a lot of > people getting parking fines. The pitches weren't even close to flat, > the first one we played on had craters, not potholes. > There are a lot of points in here. Firstly, the schedule - personally I believe that Felix and his colleagues did an unbelievable job. The original bid was for "25-30 pitches". The UKU, and the bids committee in particular, are not in a position to go round and measure all the venues, so we have no choice but to accept the info on the bid document. As late as thursday, we were still expecting over 20 pitches. I'm not sure what happened, whether one part of the venue was unsuitable or what, but there is very little we can do in this situation. To squeeze the whole thing onto 18 pitches was a monumental effort, and an early start/late finish was unavoidable. [Either that or some teams play 3 or 4 in a row.] It is far from ideal, but again we were left with few choices. We could have reduced the number of games for everyone and changed the format, but with the already discussed vagaries created by the split T0 this would have been strongly to the detriment of the fairness of the tournament - certainly more detrimental than any unevenness about which team had had more sleep. As regards the other problems with the venue - agreed. These things should be better, particularly the dips in some pitches. But again, there was nothing that the UKU could do with the bids we received. For the intended 3 mixed and 6 (some split) O/W tournaments, we received 9 bids, 3 of which were from cardiff, and 2 of which were for the same weekend in cardiff from different TDs. We had to chase up more bids just to make these tournaments happen. Even if we had known that some of the pitches weren't too flat, and that the shelter was poor, we'd probably still have had to make the same choice of venue. The big problem is the sheer unwieldy size of tours, and this is very much something we intend to sort out next year. A great deal of discussion is under way about solving many of the fundamental issues affecting tournament quality in this country for 2010. > 4 - I was continuously hunting for pitch water. Every single game. > Thankfully (!!!) we had an injured player with us who could act as > water boy and get the organisers to bring water to the fields for us. > No pitch water is unacceptable in my eyes, particularly given the heat > on Sunday. > I'm sorry that you had that experience. Personally, I played on 5 or so different pitches, and had water next to every single one. This is poor statistical evidence, granted, but given that Lewis has said much the same thing it does appear that you were very unlucky. Again, it would be nice if we could be perfect in this department, but with human error, and the possibility that teams themselves move water bottles around from pitch to pitch whilst the one from their own pitch is being filled, I think it may be difficult. At the very least, I found the provision to be vastly better than on some occasions that have previously attracted BD opprobrium. > 5 - Our first game on Sunday got moved and *nobody* bothered to tell > us. We only found out when there were three teams trying to warmup on > the same pitch... I understand that if something goes wrong and a > pitch becomes unusable then the schedule might need to be altered, but > the TDs *have* to take responsibility to notify the teams concerned. > Not to do so is simply unprofessional. > Now this we will take responsibility for. This was very much a case of human error. The schedule was not changed after being sent to BD, and no matches were moved. However, the copy sent to the TD to be printed out was an earlier iteration of the schedule (it generally goes through about 10 or 15 versions before we're happy with it), with some minor differences - chiefly in terms of swapping pitches around to reduce the walk between back to back games. Nobody at all was even aware of this until the sunday morning - I met a very confused Felix trying to work out how Fire could possibly be on pitch 1 in the 27v22 game or something like that. After we realised the error, there was little we could do to communicate it to all the people at the tournament. We informed the TD desk, so that they could explain it to anyone who asked, but in the end it just came down to the teams involved sorting it out as best they could. We apologise for the error. > 6 - I understand that some of the problems with scheduling were > related to the large number of teams on a small number of fields. The > simplest solution to this would be to hold the women's and open events > at different venues... was this considered? > No, because of the late notice that we actually had so few pitches. > 7 - Some of the teams playing this weekend basically have been working > towards that tournament for months. Is there any reason we were left > so long to know the format (not the schedule but the tournament > format, i.e. who plays who)? For the geeks out there who like to plan > ahead, this information is useful! Besides, what if there'd been an > obvious problem with the format? There were a lot of discussions at > the weekend regarding the format, but because it was only released on > Friday afternoon there was no time to make changes if they were > needed. Most people's opinion was to then not bother complaining... > but not mine :-) > The short answer is that the scheduling committee did indeed find an "obvious problem with the format", and so it was changed just a couple of days before the tournament. Also, uncertainty about the number of teams doesn't just make the schedule difficult, but also the format. If we suddenly find that we have one spare team at the bottom of the proposed format, then we have to rejig the format for the few teams above that, which often means that other changes are forced and so on. The answer is to keep A, B and C separate, but as previously mentioned that was not done because of the split Tour 0. We wished to ensure that every team got a fair and balanced schedule with an approximately equal number of games, and this means the format cannot be completely decided until fairly late. On the other hand, I take your point, and we will endeavour to expedite the publication of formats in the future - bearing in mind that this will be easier for some tournaments than others. > If this is seriously the best that the UKU can do then I suggest a > coup. And before anyone says "well you do better" or similar: > firstly, I'm willing to try. Secondly, remember that not only did you > pay £180 entry fee per team for this event, but every single person > who wanted to play has to register with the UKU and pay £27.50 (unless > you're eligible for a discount) as well. That means that the people > who get this money (TDs and UKU) are accountable, and we have the > right to complain. Do you really think that you get value for money? Clearly as a part of the UKU I'm in a somewhat biased position regarding whether we should be first against the wall. What I will say is that, as alluded to earlier, there are plans afoot to incentivise TDs in the creation of far better tournaments for 2010. The fundamental problems are the size of the tournaments and the lack of competition to host them. Both will be addressed soon. Special prizes available to those who bothered to read this far down. :-) All the best, Benji __________________________________________________ BritDisc mailing list [email protected] http://www.fysh.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/britdisc Staying informed - http://www.ukultimate.com/staying-informed __________________________________________________ BritDisc mailing list [email protected] http://www.fysh.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/britdisc Staying informed - http://www.ukultimate.com/staying-informed
