I was going to wait to post this until I had a chance to talk with the poster (who I believe will be in attendance at tomorrow's tournament at UTC), but I can see that the flaming has already begun. The purpose of this post is not to continue a flame war, but the opposite. I hope to be able to talk to the poster tomorrow so that he can offer any constructive criticism on the tournament, but I will respond in a public forum to some of these statements. Note that although the posts are about Moc Masters (academic), the tournament being referred to is Muck Masters (trash). --- "I cannot understand how a 12 round, 10 team tournament can take 12 hours." Yes, I will agree that UTC tournaments tend to run long. A lot of this is because of the leisurely pacing of the rounds. We are very lax on this matter because, first and foremost, quiz bowl should be fun. I understand those who want the "all-business" approach, and whenever we run an official ACF or NAQT event, we adhere to that way of play as much as possible. But we have found that the teams that attend our independent tournaments enjoy themselves more if we focus on the more social aspects of quiz bowl than the more competitive aspects. But more to the point, this statement is misleading about the tournament. First of all, in addition to the aforementioned 12 rounds, we also had a music round (qualifier and finals) that added approximately an hour to the day's events. Like any tournament, we had a number of problems beyond our control occur, such as: - one of the teams unexpectedly dropped out after three rounds due in part to sportsmanship issues with other teams. - one of the teams left before we did the swiss pairings. - one of the teams were held up at lunch due to their waiter. While the more business-like way to handle this would have been to proceed without them, we accommodated their trouble. The first two problems were solved with the help of free agents, while the second one was solved by switching rounds. All of these caused slight delays. Other than that, the tournament ran about as smoothly as it could. Once all the scoresheets were back, within a minute or two, all the readers were heading to the rooms. The only other solution would be to cut the tournament length, but we tried to give a good value by providing a full day of trivia. Remember also that at an open trash tournament such as this one, there are wide variety of skill levels. Rooms with teams nabbing toss-ups early and responding immediately to boni will finish five or more minutes faster than a round where each toss-up goes to the end and is gotten, resulting in a bonus. Also, the addition of audio toss-ups and boni might have added to the length of the rounds as well. I thought it would be a fun way of adding variety to the tournament, but if teams feel that they are more hassle than they are worth, I have no problem removing them. This is not meant as an attack, but I know that toward the end of the day, one of the delays I had was cooperation with your team. I will not go into specifics in a public forum unless you feel this claim is unsubstantiated and the details should be discussed. I hope we can discuss this tomorrow. --- "I'm always in shock at how poorly run and disorganized any tournament Steinhice runs is ..." Charlie had very little involvement with this tournament, as he mainly handled financial and pre-gameday arrangements. Around 95% of the actual running of the tournament was done by myself and four other UTC team members. While we all have had experience with helping Charlie run tournaments, this is the first time that we have tackled such a task. I thought we handled it pretty well. I did not receive any negative comments and was told by several players that they enjoyed the tournament and thought we did a good job. If you disagree, don't just tell us that you could do a better job. Tell us how we can do a better job. Moreover, I am especially confused about this statement considering how often that your team has attended our tournaments in the past. We have always appreciated your team making the long drives it takes to come to our tournaments and play (and have tried to be considerate of this fact, such as running Sunday tournaments that start earlier and last shorter than our Saturday tournaments), but no one is forcing your team to come. If you don't like the way we run our tournaments, don't come. --- I hope none of this is tied in any way to the sportsmanship issues that we had at the tournament (not related to the issue involving the team that left early; I will not go into discussion of either issue on a public forum). Please, if you do wish to make criticism, do not flame us. Again, tell us how we can do a better job so that your team, as well as the others, can have a more enjoyable tournament experience. John Kilby UTC ATA President & Co-Editor of Muck Masters 2005
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0: Sat 12 Feb 2022 12:30:48 AM EST EST