I wont be able to make the AGM this weekend so I'm posting this to britdisc in the hope that it stimulates some debate.
I am a little concerned about the proposed mixed tour / open tour structure next year. The decision appears to have been made to split the tour season into a mixed tour and open tour. I am concerned about the impact of introducing new players especially into the game. In the past the mixed tour has always been a good environment to bring new players into, especially new women. With the new split structure this will push most of the open player specialists into the mixed tour. What worked well in the past was that although the top 8-10 teams were competative there was a long tail of of less experienced teams in the mixed tour which made it a good environment to bring in new players. I doubt whether this will be true this year, with a large influx of open players and the hard cap on only 24 teams. This is the question that I have to answer. We've been getting together players in Exeter over the past year. We now have a player base of around 24 (of which maybe 40% are women). Apart from a couple of us none of them had played before but they are getting to the stage where we can start to think about entering them into a tournament or two. What do we aim for? If the mixed tour becomes smaller and more competive, it will be quite a step up (too great?). Alternatively do we go for the open tour (wider number of teams) but find we loose most of our women after a tour or two? I guess the point I want to make is we need to think about how we make our sport accessable. I think the mixed tour has done this well in the past. There are good pathways to bring students through from beginners to a competitive standard but the success of ultimate in the future will depend on how well we develop ultimate elsewhere (schools, city leagues, corporate teams, non-student teams). I fear that unless you live in an area which has a local league or an already well established team it will become more difficult to bring new players/teams into the sport. Ben __________________________________________________ BritDisc mailing list BritDisc@near.me.uk http://zion.ranulf.net/mailman/listinfo/britdisc Staying informed - http://www.ukultimate.com/informed.asp
