Is the tour creaking at its joints?
Yep, it is time to give it up. We can afford to move to warm up
tournaments, go along to European tournaments, and have our own
sectionals, regionals, nationals/EUCF regionals and the European
finals. Why not? Give me a good reason why not?
Here is why it works:
I spent time playing ultimate in Texas, where distances to travel are
huge but I still went to many tournaments local and far away, and I
went to Sectionals and lost every game. But the ultimate was more fun
and there was no pressure to 'have' to go to tournaments. Sectionals
are competitive events for the smaller teams and a necessary step for
the big Texas teams like Doublewide. Then regionals is a tough
tourney for say Doublewide as there are only a very few qualifying
spots. And nationals is well just tough.
From my experience in America playing with a bunch of students out
of College Station, playing at the bottom end of a sectionals,
regionals, etc structure is fine because of the quantity of other
tournaments that fill the other weekends.
So in the UK we could have a sectionals, which may be an necessary
step for a big team like Leeds, but not so competitive. Student teams
could go as a warm up for the student season, fun teams could go to
play for fun (cos thats what it is all about). Then regionals would
be the next step, probably the end of a tough season for my club in
Southampton (there could be only 4 regions, or just 2). Then a
nationals to select the top teams to go towards EUCF, or nationals
would be the new EUCF west region and our regionals would feed into
the EUCF region, whatever, is it so hard to imagine.
There are plenty of open tournaments through the year, and mixed ones
too. I could go to Paganello, Dive Hard, Windmill Windup, Brugges,
Copa Cobana, Brighton Beyond and I think I would be quite happy
(might have miss spelt one of those, but you get my point). If I then
also went to a mixed and open sectionals plus qualified through to
regionals that would be 10 tournaments, or almost one a month. Is
that not a good ultimate calendar or have you all got nothing else to
do with your weekends?
It is time to move on.
Scot
--
**********************************************************
John Armitage
PhD Student
Geology and Geophysics, NOC
http://www.noc.soton.ac.uk/gg/people/armitage/
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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