can we get a video of said dance?
Man Up! Fix Your Sh*t! And Figure It Out Yourself!
::Incoming Message From the Outer Reaches of the Universe::
Attention Polo-ists and Polo-istas, your friend in the cosmos Blazar has been forming great amounts of stardust and stray gases about himself in order to become dense enough to attract the rest of the Poloverse to Seattle for a major tournament. He needs your input, here's the question:
What is truly important to you when you travel through space/time to play polo?
It is my humble opinion that in the case of tournament organizing, less is most likely more. If the organizing club has less to worry about, more detail can be applied to the things that really matter.
Allow me to paint a brief picture of an ideal tournament situation....close your eyes and picture this....
The tourney poster appears on leagueofbikepolo, you click on it to see the deets and it falls directly in some vacation time you've got. You find out that day your team is also clear, you can all go. You're going to buy plane tickets so you contact the organizer and tell them what your team is and when you're arriving/leaving. They tell you that if you pre-register for $30, they'll send you a tourney booklet with schedules for the buses/trains from the airport and a phone number of the point person coordinating arrivals/departures/rides and housing. In the booklet there's a map detailing the courts, food stores, beer stores and bike shops. You find out you can catch the rail in from the airport, build your bike at the station and ride to the pickup courts where someone will meet you and take you to a house where you've got some floor space. If you kick in twenty bucks, the house will provide breakfast, beer coolers at the tourney and someone to take you around the city. When you arrive, everything goes smoothly and you're playing a-class pickup, hanging out with your friends.
Morning of the tournament you show up, get your registration packet (with some swag in it) and play a few warm up games while people are arriving. The house beer cooler gets set up and you can use it all day long, there's a taco wagon 50 yards away and you've got your map to show you the other food options. Someone from the host city has a vehicle and is taking people to the grocery store for supplies and you pickup some lunch material there, plus beer and water. The brackets are up on huge refrigerator boxes so you can clearly see when you're up, how much time you have until you play and who you're up against. The courts are top notch and the boards send the ball around the courts perfectly. There's a tent with a mechanic and tools, a pile of $5 tires and inner tubes for emergency flats. The sun is out and there's a cool breeze blowing, not a care in the world. After a day of great polo, there's a few hours of down time to head home and unload, grab some food and get to the night courts for pickup and partying.....
Sounds pretty good, right? Host club made sure everyone had everything they needed but they only provided the courts, some swag, prizes, a contact person to answer questions/tour people around and housing to those who paid to pre-register. Players are responsible for their transportation to/from the city, housing (pre-register!), food, beer and entertainment (which can be coordinated with houses) and their own mechanical problems.
Thoughts?
normally I'd be happy to provide one but I'm being watched like a hawk by the PETA folks. They told me I couldn't use my trained gray squirrels anymore. Nothing cleaner than a freshly squirreled winky!
godammit! stay on topic. quit hijacking my thread...
Apologies Aaron. Cut me some slack though, your subject line did state: "... Fix Your Sh*t!..."
I though it topical. Much like the ointment I needed to use after a particularly bad training incident.
But again, my apologies. I'll stop now.
"Host club made sure everyone had everything they needed but they only provided the courts, some swag, prizes, a contact person to answer questions/tour people around and housing to those who paid to pre-register" There in lies all the work in organising a tournament. Making it look seamless and simple often takes a Sh*t Ton of work. Good luck with organising your tournament, the key is to get as many people from your polo scene on-board else this is only gonna take you lightyears to arrange!
I guess what I mean is, what could you do without? In order to reduce stress on the organizing club.
If everyone had to fend for themselves for housing that would take a lot of stress off. If everyone buggered off after the last game and didn't want a party, that would take stress off the hosts. And so on, and so forth....
i am all about this...
give tourny organizers more time and money to focus on having a Big Five style court system set-up and kick ass prizes.
find somewhere to crash on your own...if you cant figure out a place to stay, maybe you shouldn't go...(for me this is seattle)
take a bus from the airport and on your way out get a map, half the fun of a new city is getting to know your way around instead of having a tour guide
i may live to eat these words but, fuck having big blowout parties at these major events...folks will find a place and people to have fun with no matter what
alot of people are spending hard earned money on these events and if you want a result you won't be looking to party all night anyway
yes i certainly agree on food vendors, shitters, mallet making nook and mechanic on site, these all cost money and should not be taken for granted.
just sayin
taking bike polo way serious since 2002
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Major tournaments should be able to outsource the running (i.e. bracketing/scheduling) of tournaments to people from outside their city, so that they can focus on logistics.
Think about the Grand Tours, it's not like you have the mayors of a tiny town that the Giro/Vuelta/Tour goes through holding the stopwatch at the finish line, or
holding the piss bottle at the doping checkpoint.
This is hopefully how the NAH tournaments will run next year, with someone in charge of the brackets from out of town, and team of volunteer court captains of both locals and maybe some outsiders too. That way the local organizer can worry about getting keeping enough ice around to ice the balls, or about where to get more kegs before the beer runs out, like they had to do in Berlin about 55 times.
Was it a year ago we had a long thread devoted to how organizers needed to provide bed breakfast lunch dinner evening entertainment transportation & free beer to all attending polo players? Thanks for starting this thread!
Not sure what you mean by "outsource the running." I consider general scheduling and running brackets to be a core activity of the organizer. It's like saying you should outsource the administration of this board so you can blog more often. It may sound nice but the bottom line is we count on you to run the board. Same with a tourney, an outsider is not the person to count on for decisions and execution.
An outsider can be sent on a beer run *far* more easily than they can be asked to set up registration and start running swiss rounds.
Some things I think visitors can be exceptionally helpful with:
- refereeing
- "queuing" or doing the leg work and shouting necessary to get the next game started (this involves knowing how to read brackets faster than anyone else, and getting to know teams you've never met)
- court set-up/tear down
- Food/beverage tasks: beer/burrito runs, clean up
- heckling and making it fun
These things help you get to know people. They're actually rewarding in lots of way.
Scheduling and bracketing is complex and organizers should reach out for advice and guidance. Hopefully a couple dozen or so "experts" will emerge from around the world.
An outsider is not the person to count on for decisions and execution..
Funny, i've seen this happen dozens of times, where a more experienced organizer visiting from out of town basically ends up setting up the schedule and the double elimination bracket. They usually don't mind, because they realize what kind of shitstorm goes down when the seeding gets fucked up.
I know you can run a Swiss Rounds tournament on the back of your hands Joel, but you're the only one with a degree in, what is it, measurement theory?
It really irritates me how housing has become expected as part of your $15 reg fee. If the Host city can provide housing for the participants, that's great. But arranging housing is one of the biggest, most thankless pain in the ass jobs at any tournament. It's not expensive for 9 people from the same city to pile up into a cheap hotel room for a couple nights.
not to mention that a lot of clubs aren't big enough to house the ever-swelling ranks of the polo army.
one more reason to roll deep if you want to host a larger event? east van hosted a 38 team tournament this weekend without any housing hassle i heard of, no one stayed at a hotel i don't think. or even camped?
i agree that housing shouldn't be a requirement to hold a tournament, but i always think it is really cool the way the polo community has always opened it's doors to the traveling player. i know for sure that i wouldn't travel for polo if it meant that i had to sleep at a motel all the time.
but i understand where this post is all coming from blazar, how and where do i book a room for my team?
I think that the housing should be provided as much as possible. It is completely awesome to go to a new city for polo and have a place to stay with a polo player. However, those crews that don't roll deep (although not even east van or seattle will have enough player housing for a hundred teams) should still expect to put some people up. There should be a note on the tourney post, "we've got enough places for x amount of people, so register early!"
registering early snags you a couch, maybe, and provides the hosts with some capital, which is another concern.
sucks when you pay for the hotel room then you get locked out though...
off topic gripe
X2
Floppy when have you ever paid for a hotel at a polo tournament?
Better: when have you ever paid for a hotel period?
Yeah, Nick! When has a whole group of people you call your friends ignored you while you knocked on a door at 3 in the morning because they thought you were off doing something you probably weren't doing, or picked the phone up off the hook so the person trying to get in couldn't call the room.
And even if you WERE doing that something, Nick, why would that warrant your friends to decide if you deserved a place to sleep?
Don't know. I like the fact of never think to book shitty hostel. In europe they are anywhere expensive (in geneva you can't imagine, 80 dollars each person for the shitiest one. Some youthhostels, but expensive too and not too many). For the Euro, we had manage housing by making people sleep into civilian protection bunker, every part of the city have is own one. If people of the local community can't house out of towner, finding a cheap solution is a great part of organisation, even if it takes lot of time.
for housing it really just comes down to how big a city it is, and how many polo players. A small club in a small city can put on a wicked tourney, but not house everyone. just look at madison for NAHBPC, 200+ people came into a town that has a dozen regular polo players.
I like to party hard and still try to win the tourney.
I think If I had to rank priorities as a polo-tournament organizer, I'd rank them 1)Making sure everyone got to play lots of polo 2) Making sure everyone had a place to stay (when possible) and 3) Making sure everyone was fed. While I don't think 2) and 3) should be considered requirements of host cities, they are the sorts of things that elevate tournaments in people's memories from "good tournament" to "great tournament" . Partying was demoted at this years crown, and we just went with very low-organization house party and a night at the knife fight court (party in a park), and it worked out great! As Jason said, people will party regardless of what you do. Just give a location for people to congregate and the party will happen.
In the age of internets, to put the effort into a registration booklet seems kind of pointless. Generate a map in google maps. Highlight important areas. Transit information for a city should be available online as well. Point people in the right direction, and they can figure it out themselves if they need too.
I think we would all always prefer brackets to be posted and clear, although it's a labour-intensive task. You're probably looking at two volunteers who aren't playing... one to run the brackets and one to write them up. If you can find 'em, use them, but it's not always easy to find people who aren't polo players that are willing to work at a tournament two days in a row.
... I think that sums up all my current thoughts on tournament organization :) Looking forward to the halloween tourney, blazar
if the halloween tournament is run according to the blazar galaxy i will be a happy man.
still forming galaxy. i'm far too hot and gaseous to be a true galaxy with stars and the like.
uh, halloween is gonna be awesome
I would like to add to Blazar's "early registration" comment
Housing and Registration are hard to do if you dont know who is coming. I have run housing now for 2 different tournaments and I consistently find that many people dont let you know they are coming. It then becomes a last min scramble to find them a place to stay. From an organizers perspective, I feel that people who don't let you know they are coming/needing housing shouldn't get it for free. Pay a little courtesy to the organizers and let them know what is happening.
Also, early registration makes it easier for hosts to know how many teams are coming and tweak any court or timing arrangements they might want to. For instance, our Halloween tournament (happening in 4 days) currently only has 8 teams registered. But I'm guessing we will have closer to 24. It is hard to pick start time, and game lengths when I'm not sure how many teams we are planning for.
To make life easier on hosts/organizers I think Pre-Registration is key.
I'm aware that we are a disorganized bunch by nature, and that many people don't know if they are going to a tournament until the last min. I'd like like to see that change, and see a bit more courtesy for the host city.
My Priorities for a good Tournament:
1) Lots of good polo, on good courts, with decent lighting
2) Well run brackets, and officiating
3) Either mechanic/tools onsite, or a shop close by who knows what polo kids need. I like the mallet making corner too
4) Map of good local food and bars
I like having a "welcome party" at least as far as a place to see friends from other cities and drink a few but it doesn't need to be fancy. E.Van did it perfectly for the Crown. Suggested entertainment locations for additional nights is great, but I can always find a way to drink too much with my friends. We are pretty good at it by now.
Free housing is awesome, but I'm also perfectly capable of smashing into a hotel room with 10 other polo players for a few nights. As our community grows, we will have to make some changes, and no other sport I know of houses all the out of town contestants for free.
For me its about the quality of the polo and the players involved. That's what I travel for.
I'd rather have a porto-john nearby than a mechanic. I don't want to scare the locals with my Grumpy-Squat™ dance.