Hello,
As those of you who attended Lake Havasu know, I (Jeff) was running our NM-TX tournaments this weekend, and was not at the Havasu event, so I'll let Mark, the director for that event, make specific comments.
However:
- The format was reduced to one day at the request of the center, and for lack of a director who could get there for two days. We had two and a half weeks to prepare for this tournament, which otherwise would have been cancelled. We tried to make an exciting one-day format for you. If it failed, we certainly won't try it again. Someone still walked out of there with guaranteed $400 and $250 first place prizes, I can't imagine they had an awful time.
- For those who didn't like the lack of finals, I don't ever want to hear from you again if you lead a tournament by 200 pins and lose as the top stepladder seed, hee hee!!! :-) Seriously, we hear you, it sounds like we should have had a finals, but didn't want to change the format on the fly.
We're pretty proud of our events, but if this was a bomb, then it was a bomb. We all just should have stayed home and worked on our Halloween costumes. We hope SOME of you had fun, especially the winners of the couple thousand dollars in scholarships that were awarded. We hope you enjoy better our other 70-plus tournaments and $200,000 in scholarship money up for grabs this year.
I'll be honest, it pretty much sucks to have three of our biggest stars (and money winners) come on this forum and rip us. I know you said it's not on JBT, but the format, but dude, it looks really bad. You're totally entitled to, don't get me wrong, but someone who reads this thread as their first ever now has a pretty poor opinion of us, and that makes me pretty sad (and nauseous). Remember how you guys felt, multiply that by me trying to please everyone, and it makes for basically a lousy week, hehe.
Two of you three have been kinda ripped at times on these boards in the past, verrry unfairly. What I'm saying is, if Havasu sucked it sucked, but if everyone who was there already knows it, I'd ask you to simply communicate directly with me, instead of post it on a board where, as we discuss endlessly, things get misinterpreted constantly. B-Car, as someone who is involved on the running-tournaments end of things (not to even mention one of teh best junior bowlers in the country), I'd think you'd have an understanding of why I'd ask that.
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This is the second time in a week that some of our formats have been critiqued by folks. The few people that post on here are hardly a fair sample, but what I'm hearing from you guys is, basically, don't screw with the format. Is that really what you want, 70+ tournaments a year exactly or close to the same? I would think that would be boring. Please send me comments directly to my email. Most of the scheduling will be done in the next two weeks, so we need all the input we can get. We want all our events to be fun and worth bowling.
Thanks,
Jeff Hemer, JBT SW
www.jbtsw.com
