Dear BTTCers,

 

The number of players at our Friday Round Robin tournaments has been steadily increasing. On the one hand, that is of course a good sign and a confirmation that the club is well run.. :)  On the other hand, unfortunately, we have reached a point where we will have to start limiting the number of players, given the facility and the number of tables we have. Last Friday we had a new record attendance with 64 players, which is exactly on the limit to what our current system can handle. Dave Bernstein raised the issue of unfair table distribution, which under the current system allows players on lower rated tables to play considerably fewer matches than on the highest rated tables.

 

Whatever your opinion, I would like to encourage everyone to take part in this important discussion in the guestbook on our homepage (www.berkeleytabletennis.org), since we will have to take a decision soon. I quote the first two contributions to this discussion below: 

 

 

 

Dave Bernstein wrote:

Some statistics from yesterday's RR; Tables 1-4 had 6 players each for a total of 5 matches per player. Tables 1-3 completed 14 out of 15 matches and table 4 completed all 15. That gives an average number of completed matches per player of 4.75.

On the other hand, tables 5-12 had 5 players each (4 possible matches per player) but only one of the tables completed all 10 matches and four of them completed only 7. The average number of completed matche per player was 3.15.

Now keep in mind that I only was able to play two matches, so there's some sour grape action going on here. But still an inequality is an inequality and we're all paying the same amount to play.

It's good that the club's attendance is up but I think we need to start a dialogue on limiting the number of players in the RR and making the distribution of players and tables more fair. What happens if 70 players show up next week? Or 80? We ought to have a definite mechanism in place to handle this.

To get the ball rolling, let me throw out the following. The RR is limited to 56 players maximum (7 per table, everybody gets 2 tables). If more than 56 people sign up then we have a lottery. That is, we choose 56 players at random from the night's attendance. The lucky ones get to play, the unlucky ones get to go home early.

Any other ideas, or is everybody (lse more or less happy with the way things are?

 

 

Mattias Eriksson wrote:

Dave, I'm glad you brought up this issue, which has been "knocking on our door" for a while now. I too think it's unacceptable when some people only get the opportunity to play 2 matches. And the decision to make the higher rated groups bigger (and give them 2 tables) was taken at a time when the number of players was not really a problem. I think the "logic" behind it was an expectation that matches on average go faster on lower rated tables. I don't know, however, whether that expectation has been been fullfilled.

I also realize that it would be good to have a policy ready for the time when we get even more players (which might happen any Friday). One idea is to buy and squeeze in two more tables. That would only make the situation a bit easier, however, and perhaps only for a short while. The conclusion is that we will have to find a procedure that limits the number of participants.

Lottery is of course one way of solving it, but I don't think it's ideal. People driving from Concord, Marin or other places far away will get very unhappy if they will loose their chance to play in a lottery. I think we should try to find a system which makes it more predictable. One such way (which would be easier to administer than the lottery) would be to cancel the latecoming acceptance policy and simply close the registration after a certain number (on a lever between 56 and 64) of entries.

Someone suggested to simply raise the fee (e.g. to 5 and 2 dollars, instead of 3 and 1 as today) and assume that less people will show up then (which is not obvious). Another option is to create a "membership fee" ( e.g. 15 dollars or 5 for juniors per Quarter) which would give priority to regulars and make it more expensive for drop-ins (they have something similar at the Concord club, where they charge 7 dollars for drop-ins). Such a system would have the clear disadvantage of disencouraging people from visiting our club on an irregular basis and would probably decrease the turnover of players with the effect that we risk facing the same opponents every Friday.

In any case, we need to identify and decide on a suitable policy very soon. All suggestions are very welcome!

 

 

Anyone should feel free to contribute to the discussion. Let's keep it in the guestbook on www.berkeleytabletennis.org, however.

 

Best,

Mattias

 

P.S. The results will hopefully be published soon.