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Subject: Newsletters, reports, making money...
Date: Mon, 23 Mar 98 17:01:13 +0000
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From: Paul Hurt <paul@ultimatum.demon.co.uk>
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This discussion has sailed dangerously close to two of my current hobby 
horses. So for what it's worth...

----------
Reports

Yes, tournament reports are nice. But good tournament reports are very 
hard to write, and require a lot of commitment from the writer both 
during and after the event. People aren't queueing around the block to 
write them. My thanks to the few people that do.

I agree with Wayne - Having been there myself, I'd argue that TD's are 
actually in about the *worst* position to write reports as they're always 
way too preoccupied with keeping the tournament running smoothly to know 
how the games are actually going.

As Roger said, the key is to "delegate". I'm just unsure whose 
responsibility it should be to delegate this particular job. The TD? Or 
the newsletter editor? TD's really have enough on their plate already, 
and editors probably have a better idea of what they need for their 
publication, so I'd vote for the latter.

With the old Ultimatum, Stu Clark was "reports editor". His job was to i) 
make sure he got hold of proper results and ii) to try to rope people 
into writing reports. It worked quite well, but then he left the country 
(probably the pressure, needed a long holiday :-)  If anyone would be 
willing to take over from him, please let me know (note that the job 
doesn't actually entail WRITING the reports, just finding other mugs 
willing to write them).

With the current state of Ultimate, any report someone writes on an event 
is a bonus. Try as one might, you simply can't *guarantee* good-quality 
reports from every tournament. Yes, it's worth trying to organise it a 
bit better, but at the end of the day we should be grateful for whatever 
we get. I know I am.

-------------------------
And in a related issue...

As for the Tour events being "a license to make money".... er, I don't 
think so. TD's are under immense pressure to keep the team entry fee as 
cheap as possible. Simply breaking even rates as a success. People forget 
about the multitude of expenses that have to be met over and above the 
basic cost of booking pitches (which in the "real" world don't come 
cheap). It adds up to a lot of cash, and a considerable risk if you get 
the budgeting wrong, or less teams enter than expected. For instance, 
unbeknown to the happy campers attending, the Lurkers tournament 
regularly lost incredible sums of money. Yet it was one of the most 
popular dates of the old calendar.

So I'm frequently dismayed by the wails of objection to paying any more 
than about 75 quid per team. Ultimate is INSANELY good value for money. I 
know of no other sport where you can get an entire weekend's tournament 
play for under a tenner per head. If as players we want the right to 
"expect" certain things from tournament organisers (e.g. tournament 
reports, nice pitches, proper showers, good parties, medical cover, 
scoreboards, pitchside water, etc) I think we really need to be amenable 
to paying higher entry fees.

I get the impression that many players are no longer content with 
"shoestring" tournaments, and the BUF is sensibly trying to instigate a 
"minimum standards" for Tour events. But arranging all these extras adds 
considerably to a tournament director's workload. If at the end of it 
all, TD's aren't allowed to make a reasonable profit as some kind of 
recompense, how can we expect them to ever contemplate running another 
event?

Ultimate has a inherited a dubious "it should all be free/as cheap as 
possible" culture, where everything is done "for the love of the sport". 
Admirable in many respects, but I think this attitude needs to change a 
little if the sport is to grow beyond it's current rather insignificant 
status.


Okay, I'm done now. Let me just get my fire-proof suit on...

Paul


---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Paul Hurt
Editor, Ultimatum Magazine, London, England
editor@ultimatum.demon.co.uk

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