Tournament Announcements: Where Are They Going? Where Have They Been?

[Cheynem]

So I'm noticing an annoying trend of late of tournament announcements being very slow to be made or announcements that are not made at all (some of the SCTs, PIANO at Ohio State, this year's Chicago Open, which I feel like usually has at least a placeholder announcement by this time).

First of all, I get that reserving rooms and dealing with school bureaucracy sucks. Sometimes this can be hard to do and in the case of CO, perhaps some prudence is a better idea rather than repeating last year's debacle which required me to spend time in (ugh) Evanston. Sometimes there's no way around this, and sometimes crap happens and things have to be changed on the fly.

But in other cases, this is just inexcusable. I'm not really much of an insider in quizbowl anymore, so perhaps these things are quietly being discussed in groupchats and other online settings and everyone who needs to know already knows, but from my perspective, this is annoying. I consider myself probably more flexible in travel and money than others as I have a decent income, don't have a family, and work from home, but even considering all those advantages, I still need some advance knowledge to make travel plans and block off time on a schedule. I can't imagine folks who are working a regular 9 to 5 job or who have lots of school/family stuff are going to have any easier time planning this.

So I'll just say this. Please be diligent in announcing your tournaments. Even if you need to make a placeholder thing or acknowledge that there's some difficulties reserving rooms, more information is better than no information.