1) No, I don't pay taxes on the income (what little there is) generated. It's a non-profit organization, no taxes.
2) Indeed not, but we don't have paid employees, so that's an extra expense for them over us.
3) They pay 4-10 times more than we do for major event locations, and maybe 50 more times if you compare their major events to our minor ones, because they use non-paintball locations and we don't.
4) We use paintball locations where everything is already set up, or our players do it if it's a university location.
5) No, we have players who know how to put trash in a trash can.
6) Look at the waiver you fill out next time you're at a paintball field - it's the same waiver. Or for University locations, we just use the existing insurance for college athletic events on campus.
7) YES! Our promotions budget is nearly 0 - I have direct contact information for the vast majority of the teams; they know to come to our website for information, and we get a lot of milage out of free publicity via event coverage etc.
8) Indeed it is - but instead of flying people around, we just use the players who are there. Again, we save mucho bucks because players are willing to do some of the work.
9) For us, we get larger events by not having commercials and charging lower entry than we would upping everyone's entry by $100 or 200 and having TV commercials. That'll change as we get bigger, but PSP/S7 already are bigger, so they DO spend money on TV commercials.
You could have better reffing if you had a player's organization that would agree to make the players use trash cans and pick up after themselves, thus allowing the promoters to spend the money they were spending on people to do it for you on referees instead. But you guys don't look at that tradeoff - if the reffing is bad, you bitch about that, if the trash is bad, you bitch about that, if the entry goes up, you bitch about that. My guys don't complain - they pick up their garbage, and we spend the saved money on referees and keep entry fees down.
You guys want the PROMOTERS to bear the responsibility, but still let the PLAYERS get to make the decisions, and THAT is what I'm saying is ridiculous. If you want to be able to make the decisions, you need to get off your asses and create an organization similar to the NCPA where the PLAYERS (through the league they own) bear the responsibility, and THEN the players will get to make the decisions.
And if you do that, what you'll quickly realize is that all that stuff you want is a lot harder to do when YOU have to figure out how to pay for it or it's YOUR wallet that ends up with the $10,000 hole or the event just doesn't happen at all.
No one is more amazed at what the promoters manage to pull off than I am. I am most certainly not faulting the job they do. I'm faulting the player's expectation that they deserve something more. They have done nothing to earn it.
- Chris
