| Scheduling of USFA Summer Nationals
The most complaints I heard about Summer Nationals involved scheduling
of events.
Scheduling is a hard thing to do. In our Division, even with
pre-registration, we once had the men's sabre event have 16 entries at
the door -- meaning that I had to have 4 extra referees...and if people
didn't know, in a qualifying event, you cannot disallow an entrant for
being late under the USFA bylaws.
I think the USFA office does a good job considering the manpower they
have available.
In our division, (a very large division of 900+ members, who most of
which are juniors) we used to have the events (running all 6 weapons in
1 day for a qualifier) go off on every hour. When I joined the
tournament committtee, we finally decided to change this -- giving a 1
hour break between weapons -- i.e. starting WE at 8AM, ME at 9AM, WF at
11AM, MF at 12PM, WS at 2PM amd MS at 3PM. By having this break in
time, it really helped facilitate the competition. It is normal to
except a 1-1/2 hour time for pools; and with the new time structure, it
helped alleviate congestion in the venue, as well as allow referees some
time to get lunch. It made the progress of the competition much
smoother, as well as give the referees some breathing room. In
addition, it didn't cause a clog of the venue with too many people, and
all the events all started within 1/2 hour of the posted starting time.
I think that the USFA with all the events included in Summer Nationals
just has to sit down and come up with more realistic schedules and
timings -- albiet, hard to do within 10 days, but if you look at it by a
strip and referee availability problem, start your Div II or III events
on the morning; hold youth events and Vet events in the mid-morning;
hold Div II/III and under-19 and under-16 events in the afternnoon. I
don't even know that this is even logisitcally doable considering the
number of events and over 10 days -- I think that perhaps they should
consider the timeline.
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