Fall Tournaments and Travel

August has gone by quickly and it's time to start looking for exciting things to do after the labor day regional this week.

August was fun (not as fun as July which is always the best month of the year) and included playing in 2 sectional bridge tournaments and 2 local tennis tournaments. This week I'll be at the regional bridge tournament in Atlanta, apparently playing 5 days, which will actually be the longest I've played at a regional, and my playing time will be split with Alli and Bryan.

For the fall, there seems to be a lot of interesting things. On the non-bridge scene, I wanna go see Third Day perform in Alpharetta on Oct 1. I want to go to GT homecoming against Clemson Oct 29 and the Thursday night game against VT Nov 10. Who wants to accompany me to any of those?

GT homecoming coincides with the Charlotte regional, which is disappointing, but I think GT homecoming will take priority, as long as some of my friends will be going too.

The game against VT is conveniently scheduled at the beginning of a long weekend (Fri Nov 11 is Veterans Day) so I'm thinking I may fly to a regional (Virginia Beach or Daytona Beach or Niagara Falls) the morning after the football game.

I guess I'll go to the Seattle NABC around Thanksgiving. That will be a good time to catch up with Hitesh, Arwa, and any of the others who migrated from GT to Microsoft.

I've always been disappointed the there are no regionals scheduled to end on Columbus Day (Mon Oct 10 this year) but this year there is one - Ottawa (Oct 10 is Thanksgiving in Canada). I really want to go to that tournament via Montreal with Shaz.

Sadly the league voted to keep the men's 4.0 tennis league Saturdays at 9:30 rather than moving to a week night so I still won't be making to to more than about half of the matches.

I also feel like I'm due for a Europe trip but that probably won't happen this fall.

Tournaments have a winner and losers

Last year I wrote a piece on flex leagues and why I dislike them. People don’t like to organize things and people are willing to pay for people to organize events so that we can play a lot and play against a variety of people. In leagues and tournaments you sign up and show up at the assigned time to play. Without leagues and tournaments, many of us wouldn't have the motivation to call up a friend or two or three and organize a game. Arranging doubles matches in tennis and teams for team events in bridge are quite possibly the two most stressful things in my life.

People play in tournaments for a few other reasons: they are competitive and want to have a couple of days immersed in whatever sport or game they play and they want to see and be seen.  To achieve these things, there must be a winner (and a bunch of losers) in each division/bracket/event and the winner must be determined in a timely-enough manner such that the other competitors will be around to witness it and the results should be posted online so competitors who leave the tournament early can find out who won. Tournaments are largely social events but part of the fun of tournaments is in getting to show off and having some sort of a crowd to watch the finals. If people want to just play for fun, not care about winning or getting tired, they’ll just play socially.

Andre going up for a serve.

If a tournament is said to be Saturday and Sunday, unless there is some natural disaster or loss of power or just an abundance of rain, by the end of Sunday, there should be a winner. This could go for any sport or game but in this case I am referring to a tennis tournament that was held this weekend at the new tennis center in Perry.

Before I go on with this rant, let me acknowledge that tournament organizers should be commended for getting it organized to begin with – it’s a tough job that most people don’t want and it’s almost impossible to satisfy everyone but there are some things that are essential to having a good tournament. This tournament in Perry was actually quite nice except that there are no winners – at least not any winners that anyone will know about. I fully intend on playing both of the finals matches that I am in even though scheduling them myself irritates me.

People like scores. Tournament draws should have scores. When we see that someone won, we like to know whether that person won 6-0, 6-0 or 7-6, 6-7, 7-6. No, we shouldn’t be concerned with embarrassing someone who lost badly. Matches should have staggered start times. Yes, most tennis matches take about an hour and a half but there is a wide variance. So, with 8 courts, if a match starts on each court at 9:30, should you schedule the next set of matches all for 11:00, and then another set of 8 matches for 1:00? No, the start times should be staggered. Schedule a couple of matches for 10:30 (some people will have really short matches), some for 10:45, and the rest for 11:00 or 11:15. For the next group of 8 matches, do the same – stagger start times between 12:15 and 1:00.

Those are both very minor complaints compared to this one: FINISH THE TOURNAMENT. Tournaments have winners, not just finalists. Don’t leave at the end of the last day of the tournament and tell the people in the finals to play the match on their own time whenever they can agree. I bet about half of these final matches won’t get played simply because of having to schedule it themselves. If the idea of the tournament is to not finish the weekend tournament on Sunday, schedule the matches for Monday. Schedule all of the matches to finish. And include in the advertisement that divisions with large turnouts may have the finals on Monday evening. I would have no problem with this other than the fact that it discourages out of town players from attending, but simply refusing to schedule the finals is absurd. Or you could start the tournament Friday night if the concern is having people play too many matches in one day. If the tournament flyer accurately stated that matches for the finals will not be scheduled, I would not sign up. If the tournament flyer said that some divisions may have Monday matches scheduled or Friday night matches would be scheduled for some larger divisions, I would still sign up with barely a second thought. I expect I am in the overwhelming majority opinion on these things but if I'm not, well, maybe I'm wrong.