Ehh, I wouldn't say there was
nothing wrong with that post; it was directed toward the fact that Waynesville is hosting a tournament the same day, and stated in a not-so-friendly manner. I apologize for any offense you might have taken from it.
For some background on the reason for the questionable post: this has been a huge problem for UMR and Mizzou this year - nearly every tournament we have hosted has had nearby tournaments scheduled on the same day. It's particularly frustrating when you've been hosting a tournament around the same weekend for the past 4 years and suddenly you find out about another tournament being hosted the same day, by a school only 35 miles away (and a school that attended our tournament in 2006, no less!), and when a school that is closer to that site drops out, the first thing you speculate is that they decided to go to the closer tournament.
Multiple tournaments on the same day help nobody - simultaneous tournaments suffer from smaller fields, forcing schools to decide which tournament to go to, and, as you've seen here, unnecessary negative attitudes between the competing hosts.
The problem is that most schools are still using mass e-mails to announce their tournaments, and because the colleges are not part of that, we rarely hear about competing tournaments until we have already announced ours. This message board has encouraged open communication about Missouri quizbowl for the past five years, and while it has brought a lot of players in from all over the state for general discussion, we don't have as many coaches on here as we would like.
There really is no reason that the primary means of announcing tournaments should be a relatively closed system of mass e-mails between coaches. Announcing tournaments in a public place, like this message board, would go a long way to reducing the possibility of this kind of thing happening. Additionally, this is the
fifth season in which the MACA calendar has been available, and tournaments are still rarely being announced there. I must give Waynesville credit for actually posting to the MACA calendar; otherwise, we probably
still wouldn't know of its existence!
It would be extremely helpful if you could go to the
Waynesville tournament thread and post some more information about your tournament, including question provider, teams that are currently signed up, etc.
In any case, I hope you stick around and encourage others to join our community. The more open communication we can get, the less likely this kind of thing will happen in the future.