Why are scholastic chess tournaments so expensive?
I’m not primarily talking about entry fees. However… Adult tournaments that I attend (small to medium events) typically give more than 60% of the entry fees back as prizes. Why do scholastic tournaments charge nearly as large an entry fee and give nothing but trophies. The US Junior Open charged up to $50 entry fees and the best that a player could hope for was a trophy that cost (on the average) a little more than $10. Were there some unknown expenses that typical events wouldn’t incur? (By the way I am NOT intending to be critical of this well-run, enjoyable event!) I can see the justification for this event being somewhat higher priced than small local tournaments, but why do some of the smaller events charge nearly as much for scholastics as for adults?
I remember way back when – I played in the US Junior Open in Crossville. The organizers went out of their way to make this event affordable. It’s one of the most affordable events I’ve ever participated in! Several of the players (myself included) were accomodated in private homes! I don’t know if something like this could still be done, but it was great.
There are a lot of possibilites for make the events more affordable. A $99 hotel rate just isn’t low enough for some families (this was the special rate at the SuperNationals and at the US Junior Open). Not only that, but you had to make your reservation well in advance to get this rate. (The US Junior Open’s hotel cut off was nearly a month before the start of the tournament; the Gaylord Opryland was more accomodating in comparison-- they switched me to the discounted rate on the day of the tournament – even though they had previously told me that the discounted rate was no longer available).
One suggestion would be to hold the tournament at a University with a large amount of vacant student housing (for a summer tournament). I’ve seen these events with VERY affordable room rates.
I’m not the only one that thinks scholastic events are just too expensive – I’ve talked to players trying to arrange sharing hotel rooms so they could attend events (and trying to figure out if they could afford it if there were only two players to the room).
Expensive, scholastic tournaments or adult tournaments will be expensive if you go out of state, stay at the hotel, meals, ect. ect… Its’ nice going to a large event, spend time with people, having the time of your life. Even if you do win the prize, for most players it still does not cover the whole cost. Have talked with people that have been at the Super Nationals or the United States Open. They love to talk about it for years or a whole life time. For them, it was a once in a life time event. With your daughter, it could be the first and last large national event. The enjoyment of talking about it for the rest of her life, priceless.
How many people went to SuperNationals? In any ratings supplement, it is easy to see several scholastic tournaments with well over 100 players. If we can assume that the finances are similar to those you describe, then it is pretty obvious. Kids don’t demand cash prizes, so these tournaments make a lot of money. Why change something that works?
Scholastic events are expensive because the organizers structure them that way.
You’re right, trophies are not that expensive, and some organizers buy inexpensive plaques and ribbons with whatever free inscription they can get added on, and then pocket the difference.
I put together a tournament in one school just among club members and charged $3.50 entry fee. I got 16 players sign up. With the money I took in, I was able to buy three trophies (they were on closeout), three ribbons (trophies and ribbons specified place numbers and were inscribed with the intiials or name of the school, the year, and the name of the tournament, almost all of the inscription for free), and 10 enamel chess pins for the rest. And I still had about $7 left over!
Of course I didn’t have to worry about rental fees for a room to play in, I didn’t take a fee myself, and since the games were played after school, there were no hotel fees! You do have to take these things into consideration as overhead in most scholastic events.
We have a local organizer who charges $15 preregisteration fee for his scholastic events, and then may give out chess books as prizes. But he has a chess club located in a strip mall and it pays his expenses to keep that running. He does have yearly memberships to his club for schoasltics that knock $5 off the entry fee.
Trying to make money off scholastic players would be a REALLY misplaced set of priorities.
I’m not opposed to making money, but I sincerely doubt that is the intent of most scholatic tournament organizers.
I hope most organizers that have both scholastic and adult tournaments just haven’t devoted much time figuring out just how cheap they can afford to make the scholastics. As opposed to spending their time trying to figure out how much extra profit they can earn by just giving out trophies.
Forsythe:
Yes, this is a memory that will last for years. However, as I pointed out, that doesn’t mean it has to be expensive. For the SuperNationals, I’ve understand the price – how many hotels can accomodate over 5,000 players?
For the much smaller US Junior Open – I think they could have found a less expensive location. If it even occured to anyone to try. After all, compare this to a large adult tournament and it doesn’t seem so expensive. Compare this to the disposable income of a college freshman or sophmore, though, and the tournament seems kinda pricey.
Off the top of my head I can think of three reasons organizers try to make money off of scholastic tournaments. By the way, I’ve only known one organizer who was willing to risk losing money on a scholastic tournament, and even he would not do it on a regular basis, so I assume your complaint isn’t that the organizer is making money, but rather that the organizer is making an apparently unreasonable amount of money.
One is that the tournament is the fundraiser for the host school to cover its expenses for the year. If an event starts out small and becomes successful and grows over the years, then an organizer who didn’t change the initial prize structure may be in this category without originally intending it. When that is the case then usually a calm word to the organizer will result in a prize structure change for future tournaments.
A second is that the organizer makes a living at chess and a tournament is one source of the organizer’s income. In some areas there are no other organizers, and in some areas the organizer works very hard to make the tournaments enjoyable so that the players will keep returning.
A third is that the organizer is building up a fund for taking risks in organizing other scholastic events, or is trying to recoup from the losses incurred after having taken such risks.
Sometimes a tournament appears to be at a break-even point, but actually makes its profit from the food concession.
Sometimes a tournament appears to be very profitable on the surface but actually isn’t anywhere near that when you look deeper.
One local example is a 350-500 player tournament that provided more than 100 free entries to the very local schools that supplied the volunteers to make the tournament run smoothly, and which was unable to get a cut of the school’s food concession.
Some tournaments go a bit overboard on trophies, and may cause other tournaments to do the same. At one tournament I’ve seen as many as 40% of the players end up with trophies, but many of the players are very willing to go to that tournament year after year.
I guess I didn’t do that good a job expressing my feelings on the subject of profit. I definately don’t see anything wrong with an organizer making money on a tournament.
I don’t feel that profit should be the PRIMARY consideration at a scholastic tournament. Nor do I feel that the profits on a scholastic tournament should be out of proportion compared to an adult tournament. If prizes make up 20% of entry fees rather than 60% (that you might see at some adult tournaments), then maybe the entry fees should be smaller. If an organizer does make a disproportionately large amount of money on their scholastic tournaments, they’ll eventually get some competition.
I don’t think profit is the primary consideration at most of the (small to medium) adult tournaments I’ve seen and I would expect the same to apply to similar sized scholastic tournaments. Large adult (and scholastic?) tournaments are in a different category, because of the large investment and organization effort (and risk) that they entail.
If the entry fees are cut, for the parents it would not make much of a difference. The whole family will take their vacation time, save up for the vacation for the the family just to have one child go to the Supernationals or whatever large national scholastic event.
There are huge profits in the scholastic events then adult tournaments. Since the 1990’s organizers are going into scholastic tournaments more then adult tournaments. The organizers have made firm bids for the scholastic events, as the site has been picked for them going into the years 2006, 2007, 2008, and the Supernationals IV April 3-5, 2009.
If you look at the adult tournaments, what organizer wants them? How many adults are in the mood to be at the US G/60, US Action G/30, US G/15, US G/10? Even the US Amateur Team Championship, has not been that great.
Its’ the market, and right now the marking of chess is with the scholastic players. If the organizers want to count entries, scholastic chess drives the market. If you want a very low turn out, bid on the US G/10.
Does anyone know how big a profit SuperNationals turned?
Remember the USCF charges a lot less money for scholastic and junior memberships, and probably loses money on those membership categories. Especially junior - you get the save services as an adult but at about half the price.
Also the USCF gets a lot more phone calls about things like ratings, etc, for scholastics than it does for adults.
The USCF has also had a scholastic coordinator in the past. I’m not sure if it does now or not, but paying for a full time position like that is expensive.
So if the USCF is trying to make a profit on a big national scholastic tournament that is just to defray the expenses it spends on scholastic chess throughout the year.
Do you expect adult chess to subsidize scholastic chess?
The size of the entry fee wasn’t my main concern. It’s not the largest part of the costs by far. Also, the SuperNationals is definately a special case – there aren’t many locations that can handle that many participants.
I think all of the extra and special features of the SuperNationals made it well worth the price. I don’t see many smaller tournaments having lectures, autograph signings, etc., however.
I wouldn’t see anything wrong with adult chess providing some subsidy of youth chess – IF we retained more of these players when the became adults. If that were to happen we’d be getting our money’s worth in the long run.
I don’t have the final figures, but the estimate I saw was that the profit from SuperNationals was in the $45,000 range. That’s probably on the high side once all the ancillary costs are added in.
BTW, the conventional wisdom, at least in the scholastic community, is that the three National Scholastics usually make a combined profit of around $100,000. Personally, I think that’s also on the high side.
The USCF does have a full-time Scholastic Director, Jerry Nash, plus Alan Kantor, most of whose duties are scholastic chess. Diane Reese, the national events coordinator, works primarily on the national scholastics plus the US Open. As of last August, she’s now a contractor, not an employee.
The cost for those three individuals is well over $100,000.
I do have a problem with that. There are several times more scholastic players than adult players. Adult dues are already $49/year. Adult chess is hanging by a thread in many areas (including mine) due to the high cost of dues.
Let’s face it, scholastic chess isn’t marketed by anyone (including the USCF) as a life-long activity. It’s being pushed as a “everyone should participate” activity. Lessons for chess are no different than swimming or gymnastics lessons. There isn’t any kind of concentrated effort to get semi-talented junior high or high school players to participate in open tournaments.
There is not anything wrong with any of that, but let’s call a spade a spade and realize that even though converting scholastics into adult players is crucial for the future of adult chess in this country, that is not even a secondary goal of the way the USCF operates in the scholastic chess arena.
Supporting information:
Scholastic players only see TLA’s every other month - or none at all depending on what kind of membership they have. No kind of effort is being made with email to try to even work around this.
The “sticker shock” of the USCF dues structure as you get older.
The all or nothing approach of not having the JTP option (this is how I got started in rated chess). In our State all of our scholastic tournaments are unrated (not my choice, we have a separate scholastic organization).
USCF’s luke warm support of online quick chess tournaments. Let’s face it - that is where most adult versus scholastic play happens these days.
I think scholastic chess should be self-sufficient and I think adult chess should be self-sufficient. I think that is the most healthy way to support the long term health of both types of play.
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Once we get an online TLA database going, it will be possible to e-mail people about upcoming events in their area.
However, I think that has to be an ‘on request’ option, which means that adults and scholastic players will have to sign up for it.
We’re even working towards that, the e-mail address registration/update form (available in the Members Only Area) has fields to sign up for TLA-Mail.
New USCF ED Bill Hall wants to make free online TLAs a higher priority than they have been, which may help in assigning some resources to get around some of the administrative issues that have kept the online TLA module in the TD/Affiliate Support Area from being released.
Bill Goichberg has made a rollback of adult dues a part of his campaign platform. Whether that can be done without it causing financial problems is unclear. Also, if going from $19 to $25 to $49 causes sticker shock, what’s a better pricing schedule?
I’m not sure what you mean by this, or what you think could be done about it.
The USCF has never been successful in online chess, having completely bungled a few attempts and made bad partnership choices in others.
Online chess is USCF-ratable, but the organizer has to be the one doing the work, just like for most other events. Chess Live has a bad track record for submitting their events promptly, and with Joel Berez (the founder of GamesParlor, the operator of Chess Live) having recently been hired as the CEO of ICC, I’m not sure if that’s likely to improve the state of online USCF-rated play at either Chess Live or ICC.
Back when I got started there was something I believe was called the Junior Tournament Player (JTP) option. I don’t know if it was just a flat fee per player in the tournament or what, but essentially you didn’t have to buy a full membership.
My understanding is my USCF number starting with a 2 signifies that I was a JTP player at one point.
We have tournaments where there are 300+ scholastic players, but it isn’t rated, since it would more than double the cost of the tournament for most players to have it be rated. I’m pretty sure we would pay $300 though to get it rated.
What happened back when I was a scholastic player is everyone who played in their first tournament was really excited about getting a rating. Some kids came out with really high ratings (go 5-0 in your first tournament against 1300’s for instance), which encouraged them to seek stronger (adult) competition. Some kids with mediocre ratings (such as myself!), would work really hard to raise their rating and eventually go from 1112 to 1900+ and leave our old schoolmates in the dust.
I also think that the lack of the JTP option hurt ratings at the bottom. Only the scholastics that came out with decent (and possibly inflated) ratings would go play in the adult tournaments, which would feed the ratings in the adult rating pools. I’m not a mathematician though - I just have memories of when every scholastic tournament was rated the ratings at the bottom were higher.
Not all IDs that begin with ‘2’ were JTPs. All it really means is that the TD who initially signed this person up used one of the green forms to do it.
Those green forms were used by some TDs to assign IDs to both adults and kids that they then collected dues from. Sometimes the USCF office would get a green form AND a white (dues) form for a player from an event.
What’s worse is that a fair number of kids who were signed up with a green form at one event were signed up AGAIN with another green form at their next event, because they didn’t know their 2XXXXXXX number.
The USCF signed up between 40,000 and 50,000 JTPs over the years of that program.
By comparison, since the scholastic boom started in around 1996, the USCF has signed up nearly 300,000 dues-paying scholastic and youth members.
It cost the USCF money to process those 40,000+ players. I estimated the cost of entering a player into the old system at about $5. That included sending a membership card, so subtract about 75 cents for JTPs and the cost was still over $4.
The USCF didn’t do any followup with JTPs. Since they weren’t members, they didn’t get a membership card, or a magazine, or a renewal notice. If they came back to another tournament, the TD had to find their ID or leave it blank and make the USCF office do that work.
Now that we have online registration (including for JTPs) and both online and downloadable databases of players, perhaps the JTP concept is more viable than it was 15 years ago. However, I think there should have been a one-time charge of $5 back then, and I’d probably advocate something along those same lines today.
That at least covers the registration costs, possibly including sending an ID card (though kids lose these quickly), but it doesn’t cover the cost of supporting that person.
Around half of the e-mail received by the USCF has something to do with scholastic chess issues, the most frequent being questions about ratings. Annual dues-paying members are helping to support the cost of staffing the office, one-time-registration fees don’t do that.
BTW, a 5 round 300 player tournament would have 750 ratable games. At 18 cents/game, the ratings fee for that event, if submitted online, would be $135.
Maybe we could reduce the JTP costs by creating some kind of ID that the TD could generate themselves on-site and pass out to the players?
I work in the Medicaid arena and when a mother on Medicaid has a baby born the baby is a K-baby, which means the baby gets the mother’s ID with a K on the end. Eventually a real ID is issued.
Maybe we could do some combination of the affiliate ID and a sequence (dropping the letter at the beginning of the affiliate ID) for the JTP ID? Then the TD could just hand out the ID cards at the tournament. There could be a downloadable PDF document on USCF’s site that prints a bunch of temporary cards that the TD could cut up with scissors and write the number into.
Douglas, I’ve been designing computer systems for nearly 30 years and have learned one immutable fact: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A TEMPORARY ID. (BTW, when I was living in Illinois I used to do a lot of computer work for doctors, especially billing for Medicaid patients. Fullly half of the problems we had with payments were the result of ID issues.)
I will NOT implement any kind of temporary ID scheme unless ORDERED to do it, because it WILL be hard to administer and it WILL cause problems. Hopefully the USCF will heed that advice, though it has a long history of not listening to good advice, including some of mine. (I’m in a rather cynical mood today.)
We have around 750 IDs identifed as duplicates, and probably thousands more that SHOULD be identified as duplicates. And every week we get four or five tournaments in the mail that have one or more of those duplicate IDs in them.
Temporary (or duplicate) IDs live forever!
BTW, are all TDs aware that you can upload a membership batch, pay for it by credit card (where payment is necessary) and generate temporary ID cards on your printer a few minutes later? If you have net access you can do that from your tournament site. (If you have time, of course.)
Maybe this is a silly observation, but could we be trying to get the wrong adult members when we’ve tried to retain scholastic members as adults?
I remember when I quit playing chess regularly (as a young adult). Now that I have a daughter playing, I’ve started back. Maybe we should make a strong push to get more parents of scholastic players to join themselves. They could support chess financially, become TDs, …
This “voluntary” financial support would be much better than simply getting more money from the scholastic players directly and could provide relief for those lower income families trying to support their child’s chess activities.
For that matter, I wonder how many adult members are like me and only joined/rejoined when their son or daughter started playing? Maybe scholastic chess is supporting adult chess more than you’d think?
Doug, I use JTP options in the K-3 division of our tournaments here, and having quite a success with it. Some of the students that played last March were so encourage getting rated that they purchased full membership and played in the SuperNational in Nashville. I think it’s also the reason why our USCF-Rated summer tournament 3 weeks ago draws a reasonable number of participants.
My opinion, if we start rating K-3’s in the state championship it will help encourage the kids and parents to purchase full membership. I know it will create extra work for the organizer and TD’s to get the players registered as JTP. Though personally, I have not encountered any difficulties getting my players registered online, either full or JTP.
If we start the kids in rated tournament, possibly we can eventually move to USCF-rated state championship in all division in the future.
BTW, the MS State scholastic individual championship separate kids in Strong & Reserve section. Wihout the rating how can we accurately place the kids in the correct section?
