Loads of effort for nowt

A large amount of effort, dating back to before Christmas, turned out to be for nothing this week as I was forced to cancel Resurrection.  With ten teams pulling out over the last four weeks, it just became too small an event to be viable.  Annoyed as I am at those teams for pulling out, I guess some of the blame must lie with me.

Busy as I was with Mix & Mingle throughout January and February, it was a long time before I got around to contacting the teams who had entered Resurrection, maybe a month after they had entered.  I then came up with a bit of a complicated payment system and teams started to pull out.  I can only put my hand up and say that this was my fault.

That being said, I could afford to lose a few teams from the event and still make it a quality weekend, but I certainly wasn't expecting to lose the number that I did!  One point I'd like to make is that I really feel that teams should not enter an event if they do not know they can field a full team.  Most of the captains told me that they really wanted to come but their players had forgotten about it and made other plans, or they didn't realise it was Easter weekend.  I don't really see that that is good enough if you are going to enter tournaments!  We see the same thing at Mixed Tour every year when teams enter without having enough girls - if you can't field a full team, don't enter!

Hmmm, rant over I think.

Anyway, I continued to put a lot of effort in to making Resurrection an awesome weekend for those teams that were coming, all five of them!  I had plans to make the second day a Hat tournament so everyone got plenty of pitch time; there were three big parties planned; and a prize draw to raise money for Right To Play with a number of great prizes which had been donated.

When I got back from Cardiff on Sunday night, I had an email which I really didn't want, one more team had dropped out.  That was it.  I was set to lose a fair amount of money and no one would really enjoy a tournament with only four teams (especially when two of those were struggling for players), so I cancelled everything.  I let the teams know first, then the venue.  I then cancelled the parties and finally contacted the charity to tell them I wouldn't be raising any money for them at this point.

Thankfully the venue have been pretty good about it.  I have to pay a £100 cancellation fee but they will take this of the cost of the event if I run it later in the year.  I'm currently looking at making this a full-on hat tournament in September (just waiting to hear back on likely dates).

The prize draw will now take place at the end of July when I host one of the UKU Regional events.  The money raised will go into my sponsorship fund for the RTP Brussels-London cycle ride.  Seems like a crazy thing to do but it is a challenge and I think it'll be fun!

So it's back to the drawing board for me.  Resurrection should return later in the year, but it will be after I host UKU-R at Spinkhill; I hope to run a one day junior/schools event alongside regionals; and I'm working on a new Open tournament to be held in Ipswich (with a view to developing the game in schools over there).