Wow, everyone seems to be eager to hurl criticism as soon as something major goes wrong with the schedule for the first time in years and years... maybe I can put things a little clearer / blunter, being free of any official affiliation with the UKU (and simply not being as nice a guy as Si):
1) we wrote a schedule for 21 C teams and 13 W teams, it took hours. We don't have enough unpaid volunteers with loads of free time on their hands, so the seedings were only looked at on Thursday evening, when it was noticed that Ultivents had made a huge mistake 2) Friday morning, whilst coordinating with the women's board to decide on the best format for the new number of teams, it was realised Ultivents had made another huge mistake 3) Friday midday I spend ~4 hours writing a 23C, 12W team schedule, and although I enjoy the process, at that exact time I'd rather have been watching the world cup games 4) Friday 11pm Si gets told that Ultivents have made another huge mistake, stays up til 2am to re-write / fix a re-write which would've meant teams started much earlier than the original schedule - thus heroically averts a catastrophie whereby teams would not even be there for their first games (or not even be scheduled to play at all) None of this would be a problem if we just told teams to be at the venue at 8:30am on Saturday, and come to the TD desk to get a copy of the schedule. That would work, but instead we try to give people some notice so they have the chance of a lie in or whatever, and we suffer hours of re-writes when dropouts happen or when Ultivents are involved. Meh, I'm going to censor the rest of the things I feel like saying right now... but if you have smart criticisms like "no team should play 7 games in a fair 13 team schedule" or similar, have a go at attaching a 'fixed' schedule to your great idea (or bring more players). If it's as simple as "the extra team should've been put in the bottom group rather than the middle, thus angering the 8th seeded team massively rather than slightly upsetting the other teams in the group who didn't bring enough players" then you should be happy to hear plans are being made to consult each and every women's team contact about the format before finalising the WT3 schedule - thankfully made possible by a few new volunteers coming into the women's committee. If you're in the C Tour and feel hard done by, then either win the games you think you should win, or do that thing where you attach a 'fixed' schedule to a suggestion. If you're just going to say X was bad or Y should've been done, without checking whether it was even possible, then, well... Anyway, a) the situation stays as it is, with your schedules being written for free by a few volunteers who fairly enjoy the process, and you get your copy usually a few days before, but very occasionally (due to no fault of our own) changes will be made on friday / sat morning, and every few years something like this weekend happens (which is a shame because otherwise this system works fine). b) as above, except you turn up and get your schedule at 8:30am on the Saturday of the event, thus you never need to worry about when to get to the tournament or whether the schedule will change. c) someone / a team of people (like Ultivents?) get paid to write the schedule, meaning it's definitely going to be done & out earlier (providing you're happy to accept walkovers in the case of late dropouts), and you can complain all you like at them if they get their job wrong. I for one wouldn't want this job. Besides, how much value do you put on it? Each schedule usually takes between 6 and 20 man hours to complete, so at a pretty weak £10 per hour that's up to £200, which would be directly coming away from junior initiatives and other areas where (in my opinion) the money is better spent. Like I say, I have no official affiliation with the UKU so some of the above is guesswork and I could've missed the mark terribly with some stuff I've said. I have faith that Si is aware of all aspects of the situation and will continue to make the tough decisions needed for our benefit (as players) where necessary. Lastly if you're going to complain about something, then offer some form of a solution; often an outside view can offer a new perspective, plus its far less annoying to respond to someone who has really looked at the schedule and tried to improve it. Felix not on behalf of anything __________________________________________________ BritDisc mailing list [email protected] http://www.fysh.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/britdisc Staying informed - http://www.ukultimate.com/staying-informed
