In which we start to see that virtual tournamentation is going to raise a few issues

I think this is an interesting question. In a world of virtual tournaments, distance is meaningless. I can attend a tournament down the street as easily as a tournament in Cooch Behar, or more to the point, vice versa. I can attend a tournament anywhere. So how, or should, tournaments limit entries? If a tournament has an octas bid, everyone in the hunt will want to attend. This includes the hunters who would be lucky to escape without shooting an arrow into their own feet, the Orions who should be going JV in Podunk (sorry, Podunk), not Varsity at Glenbrooks. As soon as the $ircuit can change that $ to a C, things get interesting.

There’s another interesting question, that of independent entries. In a world where independent entries are often high school students who, if they are not traveling alone, have at best a “chaperone” who is maybe a college freshman or sophomore. I have always been hard-assed about independents, if for no other reason than if one of them falls down the stairs at a tournament I’m running, I’m going to have to be the one to take them to the hospital. If it’s an independent with a parent, obviating my need to help push the gurney, that independent is taking a slot from a school that is one of my regular customers. What business caters to fly-by-nights over their regulars? That independent isn’t going to be back in a couple of years. Do I want my regulars do remain satisfied over the long term? (At a tournament once, a coach had some cockamamie complaint that was ludicrous on face. The TD college kid wanted to blow her off. I pointed out that she was an annual guest paying upwards of a couple of thousand dollars year after year. Cockamamie and ludicrous go out the window at that point, and you listen sympathetically and promise to do your best to solve her problem.)

Limits are going to have to be set for virtual tournaments, obviously, if for no other reason than at some point, divisions get too big to run meaningfully (cf Harvard). Of course there are other considerations, like room management (since virtual rooms apparently are not free, but I wonder if that will be the case forever; maybe we’re just not seeing the obvious work-around). 

The thing is, in the non-virtual world, we don’t think too much about who is attending, because we have space limits and preset rules about status and the like. Now we’ve got to start thinking about these former givens. We have to go back to the beginning and ask ourselves what is the point of our tournament, other than fund-raising (itself an issue that starts flapping in the wind in the virtual universe)? 

Things are starting to get interesting.