Air Cap Comments

Wow! WOW! What an amazing turnout. 110 for the first blind draw Friday and 66 for the second. I can't remember the numbers for the Youth-Adult shoot, but I remember 43 entries in Mixed trips. We figure 30 - 35 to be an outstanding turnout for Mixed Trips. We had 10 more teams than that. 10 Mixed Trips teams is 30 darters.

In Men's Singles there were 65 entries. That put the preliminary match in the 128 bracket. I don't think that's ever happened at an Air Cap in over 20 years. Maybe at the old $10K+ Air Caps in the early '80's when we played the Air Cap on 30+ boards.

My early guess is that we had a record turnout at least 10% bigger than any recent Air Cap and probably 20% bigger than a "typical" recent Air Cap.

The huge majority of players I talked to loved the event and had a great time. A few complained about long waits between when an event started and when they got their first board calls. This is a legitimate concern for them and needs to be a concern for us.

We got all but 3 events started on time with board calls for preliminaries made within about 5 minutes of closing the events. The first board calls for the Saturday Blind Draw (9:00) were made at 9:30. We didn't have boards available and we didn't have matches available because the participants were playing in events still running. Open Singles Cricket (7:00) initial board calls were made at 7:20 for the same reasons. The other event that didn't start on time was Youth-Adult, the first event Saturday morning. That event started 40 minutes late when entries were held open to even up the Adults and Youth. Between the late start and the number of entries, we still had 8 Adults in the Youth event at 10:30 when Mixed Trips board calls started.

Another problem was slow play and long matches. The general plan is to allow 30 minutes for a round of play and sometimes a longer round. To demonstrate this, the Saturday league is handicap and a 2 of 3 format. In handicap we have players starting in the 800's and 900's in '01 games and players starting at 400-500 in Cricket and we chalk our own games. Those matches finish in about 30 minutes per round. From early Saturday afternoon into the evening matches, we had matches going 45-60+ minutes. To make matters worse, those matches tended to group into one bracket leg, which seriously extended the length of multiple events.

By the time we got to the 4th event Saturday we were running brackets and board calls for 3 events simultaneously. It wasn't because we weren't filling boards, it was because most events had an extra round due to the turnout. The extra round meant we had more people playing in earlier events and fewer matches to call in the event that was starting.

Women's Doubles 501 began on time at 2:30. At 5:00 when we made the first board calls for Women's 501 Singles, we still had 8 women playing in Doubles. That eliminated a lot of possible early board calls in Singles. It also meant there were the semi-finals and finals still to be played in Doubles before we could call those Women in Singles. That led to some Women getting their first board call in Singles 2 hours after the first board calls were made. That has to be dealt with.

Some tournaments minimize problems by intentionally setting up players in previous events against each other and making sure they aren't in preliminary rounds. I'm strongly opposed to that. It makes the tournament run smoother, but it's at the expense of an honest draw.

In one instance we called a Ladies preliminary about the same time we called the Finals in an earlier Ladies event. The preliminary match finished, which gave us a board and a match to play, so we called the next round for the winner of the preliminary. That match ended before the Finals from the previous event finished.

On the lighter side, we had someone pick up 2 board call tickets and mix them into the winners tickets - and no one called for the matches noticed their tickets were missing. Someone saved a losing 501 entry from the round of 32 and turned it into the round of 32 winners in Cricket. One person in Mens Singles nearly got called to 2 boards in the same group of board calls because he entered the event twice.