In which we further ponder waitlists as big as the Ritz

I keep getting people telling me they shouldn’t be on the waitlist, and I’ve been finding that agreeing with them is the best policy, and then I refer them to the NDCA blog post. Not that there’s answers there (although there may be) so much as at least there’s understanding. And I do want to solve this, because I’m going to have to go through it all again for the Tiggers.

An underlying problem with most of the proposed solutions is that they’re onerous. They force the tournament do take difficult measures. And they punish the registrants. Severe entry limits? Well, you get more schools, but is that what you really want, especially at the expense of your longtime stalwart supporters, the schools that have been there year after year with an army or two? Fines or early fees? As CP points out, TBAs are for convenience. Making people put in real names, which really aren’t real, is just punishment for being realistic. Which also means not eliminating TBAs altogether, as well as charging for them way early.

The thing is, the idea that you have to sign up at a certain moment, and that’s your warrant for priority, while seemingly fair, is rather punishing. The coach of one of your favorite programs gets called away for a minute, and is thus too late to get in any team members? It looks to me like a lot of programs assign registration to some kid, poised at the computer as if they’re trying to cop tickets to a hot concert. I mean, really. It’s come to that? The arbitrary nature of first come, first served may have as its only virtue its arbitrariness; it's not a great measure of whether a team is tournament-worthy.

Obviously this is a problem only with certain tournaments, and I’ve heard from folks who say they would kill to have this problem, but in fact, those certain tournaments tend to have national draws, making them everyone’s problem. (And no, you don’t want to be in our position, because I assure you that you have neither the time nor the inclination to answer all the emails, at least not to everyone’s satisfaction.)

I’m going to be mulling this over for a while. I’ll probably throw together the next podcast on this subject.