I’m trying to run our school’s first significant scholastic tournament on May 11. We’ve got listings up on the USCF and ICA websites, and I’ve distributed fliers at many large local tournaments, and directly to coaches and principals at many schools. We have an online entry system set up. And as of yet, we have no entries. I’m sure having it in the City of Chicago doesn’t help with the suburbanites that make up most of Chicago’s USCF activity, but still.
But it’s still early. Our early entry fee deadline is April 29, so we’ve got a week and a half. When should I get worried that we aren’t going to have the entries we need to make the tournament worth running (not just at a loss, but at a huge loss)? And does anyone have an estimate I can use for about what percentage of entries typically come after the early entry deadline?
Chicagoland is notorious for people waiting until almost the last moment to enter scholastic events (and IL in general is even worse at the high school level, except for tournaments that are known for topping out on their allowable number of entries). When the events were larger I’d often see tournaments with 10-20 advance entries a week out and over 400 the day before.
That said, Sevan has a good point. The city kids may be going to a free tournament (a CPS event cannot charge an entry fee) and some of the suburban kids may be hesitant for a city event (the Latin school event helped mitigate that to a bit).
There are also a couple of tournaments on Sunday.
Last Saturday a tournament in Elgin drew 71 scholastic players (55 in the rated sections) plus one adult (the open section is primarily scholastic). It was relatively normal with 18 entering the morning of the event (allowed by that organizer) even though the entry fee jumped from $25 a week out to $30 a few days out to $35 on site. It had 46 registered a little less than a week in advance.
Looking at the ICA listing, I am not certain that it is USCF-rated (I am guessing yes as otherwise it would have been mentioned). I can add your event to my e-mail list.
Yes, I was very annoyed by that–they didn’t post on ICA’s website until after I did, and we purposely scheduled on May 11 to avoid other tournaments on May 18.
We checked to make sure the registration website was working.
I thought we had fairly good interest from talking to coaches at the CPS North side championship back in March, and to other players and coaches at Knight’s Quests, but that YCFC tournament may very well interfere with that.
We’ll just have to hope for the best and if we take a loss, try again in the fall. Since we’re a private school and not in the CPS loop, we don’t have a good way to plan around CPS events that don’t get posted to ICA early.
Jwiewel, the top 3 sections are rated (I thought that was apparent from having separated unrated sections and rating-defined sections, but good to know for next time), and it would be great to have us added to your email list. Thank you!
Unrated sections are not the same as non-rated sections. An unrated section can be limited to unrated players (such as the Supernationals K-3 unrated, K-6 unrated, K-9 unrated and K-12 unrated sections, all of which were submitted for ratings). A non-rated section doesn’t get rated.
I am adding the following to my calendar e-mail
5/11 Chicago - Benito Jaurez Academy on Cermak, G/30 (USCF-rated K-3 U600, K-8 U10000, K-12 open and non-USCF-rated K-3 and 4-8)
5/11 Chicago - Burbank Elementary (Youth Chess Foundation of Chicago) FREE, G/20, not USCF-rated (K-4, 5-8)
Jeff, it is not just Chicago. I think this is everywhere. The only
surefire way to minimize this is to charge one heck of a late fee.
Say, for example, $ 20 on-Time and $ 50 at the door. That does
get people’s attention. I have seen scholastic events in which 50-60% of the attendees are on-site. Now, this is not a lot of fun for
the organizer or TD Staff, so the late fees are certainly in order.
IMO…and this is from personal experience in other youth-based organizations with a 4-month timeframe for registration…overly punitive late fees just don’t work. Those deter people from attending at all. For on-site fees, the idea is that it should be enough to get people to register online prior to the event, and large enough so that it will be suitably profitable to cover incremental costs and make the last minute entry worth it.
Think very hard…and get some advice…before enacting a fee hike (of any stage, whether early to regular or regular to late, or late to on-site) over 50% of the previous stage cost.
If you’ve ever read “Freakonomics”, by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, the book offers a pretty good explanation WHY late fees, even high late fees, often don’t encourage players to enter early.
Whenever I see a tournament tack on a high on site entry fee compared to the advance fee, I turn the page. Sometimes players have no choice but to enter on site. Work, kids activities, and other last minute things crop up. I often don’t make a final decision until the day before, after assessing how I feel about playing and if I really have the whole weekend free. When I see a difference of $10 or more between entry fees paid, my decision is easy; I will skip the event.
At one tournament I directed recently, attendance was affected by weather. Had it been raining, the kids who had soccer and baseball games would have showed up. It was a sunny Saturday, so the parents took them to their games.
If you have a problem with players showing up late all of the time to enter, just make sure your TLA states that entrants after a designated time will receive a half point or zero point bye for the first round. Takes a lot of stress off the TD getting the event started on time.
Then there are tournaments that are advance entry only. Some of those have occasionally had to turn away advance entries (no space) or have contacted some coaches to see if they can reduce the number of players their school is bringing so that an additional school can bring a half-dozen players.
I organized the chess competition for the Cornhusker State Games for 25 years before stepping down 3 years ago.
Because the CSG is much more than just a chess tournament (with 40+ other sports), and registration is handled through a central office, it has never accepted on-site entries in chess.
Among our top players, several of them found out the hard way that ‘no late or onsite entries’ meant exactly that, and entered on time in subsequent years.
I wonder how one runs a large scholastic event without steep late fees or outright prohibiting on-site entries. (I realize the OP probably planned for a modest sized local event.)
Well, it’s not promising at the moment. Only 4 entries not from my own students, though I haven’t heard back from my co-coach on what entries we got yesterday. Unless we can really negotiate our venue down to a more reasonable price (possible–maybe we can cut our number of rooms used), or unless I get surprised with information that 11+ entries came in last night, it looks like we’ll have to cancel. Very frustrating. No wonder we can never find rated tournaments closer to the city than Skokie!
The “traditional” procrastination of many scholastic parents/coaches sending in entries makes it tough to decide whether or not an event will have enough entries. I know of an event last decade that was converted into a chess festival because there were not enough tournament entries a little over a week in advance, and it had more entries at that time (still <20) than a 400+ player event two weeks previous had had when it was a week in advance of that tournament. On the other hand, I’ve seen events where they didn’t get many entries a week in advance simply because they didn’t get many entries period.
At least all our players are rated 300-500, so if it turns into a 5 player round robin instead of the 5 section tournament we started with, no one should object too much. But our venue was way too expensive–we expected to break even with concessions at about 35 players. If we had been able to use our own school-church basement like we originally planned, we’d be OK.
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