ACF (and NAQT) Scheduling For Next Year

[benchapman]

Now that all the regular season ACF events and SCT are over, I would like to point out an issue with ACF (and NAQT's) choice of dates for their tournaments this year:

Regionals and SCT are one week apart
The one-week gap between Regionals and SCT creates a lot of strain on clubs by forcing the ones that are not hosting to make back-to-back weekend trips. At least in Canada, this involves overnight stays for a large percentage of the field. This is an issue specifically because Regionals and SCT are qualifiers; teams cannot evade the travel burden by playing an online mirror at a later date. The only option for teams to deal with this travel burden is to play the online SCT mirror, which depletes already-bare DI fields. Furthermore, given the risk of catching COVID at tournaments is non-negligible, people who contract it at Regionals are unable to attend SCT and qualify for ICT. Putting Regionals and SCT two weeks apart would create a weekend gap between the two tournaments and alleviate the travel burden.

Fall and Winter are three weeks apart
While Fall and Winter being 3 weeks apart does not cause the same travel strain when they are considered alone, a similar issue occurs when trying to schedule a tournament (Penn Bowl the past couple of years) in between them. Considering the large number of housewrites, a circuit wishing to mirror them all must use the weeks between Fall and Winter. This tournament must be either back-to-back with Fall or Winter, which puts a similar burden on players and staff. While this issue is less severe than the Regionals-SCT issue, ACF could help alleviate it by making the gap between Fall and Winter either two or four weeks.

I am sure there are other factors besides these ones that impact ACF and NAQT's scheduling; however, I think it is worth discussing this issue considering that the current state of affairs is suboptimal.

[Fado Alexandrino]

Ben makes several excellent points for both the SCT/Regionals and Fall/Winter issue. To add on with similar experiences in the circuit before Ben's time,

If ACF regionals wants more teams, it needs to be two weeks apart from SCT. Experienced players are obviously going to do whatever it takes to play both, but with SCT D2 essentially being about half a novice field, it is way more enticing to newer players. With tournaments being just a week apart, we have often advertised to our less in-the-know players that if you can only attend one, it should be SCT.

Even though Fall and Penn Bowl don't overlap in field, as Fall is one of the most significant tournaments of the year, the members of the community who would generally play (or staff) Penn Bowl (or whatever is the week after Fall) are going to be staffing and/or trying to coordinate a large haul of novices to attend Fall. That itself is exhausting and has prevented myself in the past from wanting to attend a tournament the week after Fall.

[thedoge]

I agree with Ben here.