Yo! difference is "sectionals" or whatever are local. Less travelling see?
There are loadsa smaller rugby club-type venues that can take around 16 team on good quality turf / home/away changing rooms. I think that the larger you get the harder it is to find venues, but does the quality really go up? (bristol/mansfield). I'm fairly sure that food quality goes down the more people have to be catered for (thats not right is it?). You'd be surprised how much easier it is to do catering/set up/water/schedule changes etc for smaller tournaments. I'm fairly sure that the rest of europe would eye 8 very competitive tournaments in a single country with envy. Its not the tour its the fact there's loads of us who wanna play. I'm sure I had something else to say... Tom ps - the email mentioning chev/fus/leed/clap was a slip of the mouse - so feel free to rip it to pieces. No offence meant to any of the teams in question - sorry. On 5/14/07, Simon Statham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Errr, your 'sectionals' (whatever that's supposed to mean) seem to be exactly the same as the Tour. Tour 1 is "competitive events for the smaller teams and a necessary step for the big teams" - i.e. all teams play on a level playing field. Then Tour 2/3 are peer seeded so it's tough for those that want it and 'fun' down the bottom end where teams take it less seriously. The main reason I see for keeping the Tour is simply the quality of organisation. If you start going regional you are suddenly requiring many more people to step forward to organise events - we know the there aren't enough bids every year to fill the 8 UKU events, so how likely are we to get many more people suddenly coming forward to host events? Low! Secondly, if you have fewer teams then the quality of venues you are likely to get will be much, much lower. How are you going to persuede a good quality venue to set aside a weekend and host an event when you can only supply them with 100/150 people to make money off (selling food, buying drinks etc)? We'll end up playing on pitches which are essentially fields with some changing rooms (if you're lucky). The Tours we have now are quite large 'events' and as such are able to command good quality venues where we can expect to find food laid on, camping on-site (for some), quality changing facilities, a bar open in the evenings etc etc. Moving to smaller regional tournaments would be a serious step back in the quality of event that eveyone has become used to. Only in the South East would there be enough teams available to hold a big enough event. Finally, at the end of the day all teams like to know where they stand in relation to others. Having ranking events like the Tour is the only way for teams to know how good they are and how they have improved from one event to another and one year to another. All of the other events you have mentioned are one-offs. How can you possibly know how good you are nationally if you come 10th at Copa or 3rd in the Midlands ladder league? I don't know for sure but I reckon that if you looked at the rest of Europe, they all eye our Tour with envy. It's not perfect and there are a few things within it that I don't agree with but the fundamental ideal of getting all the teams together to battle it out to determine who's the best in the country is spot on. Splitting it into A and B Tours has also been a massive step forward. John Armitage <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: 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] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ __________________________________________________ BritDisc mailing list [email protected] http://www.fysh.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/britdisc Staying informed - http://www.ukultimate.com/staying-informed --------------------------------- Yahoo! Mail is the world's favourite email. Don't settle for less, sign up for your freeaccount today. __________________________________________________ BritDisc mailing list [email protected] http://www.fysh.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/britdisc Staying informed - http://www.ukultimate.com/staying-informed
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