Originally posted by fluffy bunny
2 up 2 down who gives a c?@! win or lose that’s what matters,
also I was under the impression that D7 was a serous tourney ? not just a turn up and have some fun (at £245 per team + paint that’s not having fun that’s painful, + watts all this about letting teams enter at the last minute and messing with the divisions sounds more like filling your wallet, marshals pay more £ and get some pros (with 32 teams totalling £7840 per month maybe u can), 4 divisions 3 fields ? top thinking if your having trouble finding a 4th field try R.W.P the only uk company who I know that makes sub air fields on 07779 576 090 sorry the only number I can find I believe there around £2.000for a 25 piece field maybe u can get one on lone, still after all my bitchen its a bloody good tourney
Be fair Fluffy Bunny - unless you've run a number of tournaments yourself you can't really have experienced some of the problems and costs organisers have. For starters, by the time site rental and H-PAC have been paid that's a big chunk of the entry fees gone already (Dartford is possibly the most expensive site I know for land rental per player!). Then there's all the other attendant costs, like staff other than refs, toilet cleaning, build costs - netting doesn't grow on trees or hang itself on telegraph poles which just happen to appear in the right places, nor do staging areas build themselves. Even little things mount up, like replacing things that go missing like buckets & squeegies, carriage costs of the fields if someone is kind enough to lend them for the event, the massive phone bills. And the refs don't just cost their wages each time, they also get fed and given plenty to drink throughout the day.
4 divisions of 8 teams on 3 fields works fine, gives us a finish time of a little after 4.00pm provided there are no delays, including a well-deserved hour break for the refs at lunch time. Teams will always drop out at the last minute, so unless you want to have a bye and one less game in a division you have to be prepared to slot teams on the reserve list in somewhere. What you don't want is what happened at one M25 last year - a scratch team made up of Div 1 players filling the vacant slot in Div 4 - which is the kind of thing you get if the divisions are set well in advance. As far as late extra teams goes, I gather that was simply an administrative error & I've been told it won't happen next time!
