East Lincoln Lanes, thank you so much for welcoming comments from bowlers like myself. Although I may not speak for the entirety of the bowling community, I believe I convey an accurate description of the tournament bowler's thought process.
In regards to your March 27th date, this may be a bad date for this tournament. As of right now, there is a VMSBT tournament (a popular Baltimore/DC area tournament organization) on that day, which may cause you to lose alot of entries for your tournament. If you look on
www.40boards.com and click on the "Tournaments" tab on the left, you will see the tournaments which are running for the next few months. Avoiding dates which have other tournaments scheduled will help to maximize the number of entries you will get for your tournaments. As of right now, April 3rd looks like a much better date for your tournament. March seems to be pretty jam packed with other shorter format tournaments which may cause you to lose participation. If you are able to run tournaments on Saturdays, this may open up several more dates as most tournaments are being run on Sundays.
Again, I don't want to tell you when or how to run your tournaments, but it really does hurt the bowlers when 2 or 3 tournaments are running the same day within a 100 mile radius (as we cannot attend all of them, or else we would!). This is a lose-lose situation for everyone, as each tournament will see 1/2 or 1/3 of the bowlers they would have seen if they would have scheduled it on a day where no one else was running any tournaments. I wish more tournament directors could be made more aware of the 40 Boards tournament calendar when scheduling their dates, as this would be a win-win situation for everyone.
As far as the pattern to be used, I would say it would be wise to use the Kegel Challenge series patterns rather than the Kegel Sport Series patterns. The Challenge series tends to be slightly higher scoring than the Sport series, and this might help build a bridge between the hardcore tournament bowlers and the occasional tournament bowler, therefore attracting more entries for your future tournaments. The key is to make them tough enough that it isn't a carry contest, but easy enough that bowlers can still miss slightly and get to the pocket. I believe the Challenge patterns suffice perfectly for this type of scoring enviornment. The Challenge patterns I would suggest using would be Sunset Strip, Abbey Road, or Middle Road, as these give many different styles of play a chance to score.
When you post a date on here for your tournament, I will be sure to spread the word to my fellow bowlers down here in the Baltimore/DC area, and hopefully we can get a few carloads of us to make the drive up.
Thanks again, and we (the bowlers) greatly appreciate your open ears and efforts.
Edited by pocket710special on 2/9/2011 at 2:44 PM