Outrage over TiV
Matt Sheehan
Cultimate handled Trouble in Vegas this weekend. I've seen
some "what could cultimate do about the weather?" posts and
this attitude baffles me.
Cultimate organized a tournament and courted teams from
across the country, telling them that they would have three
full days of high-level ultimate in Vegas. They did this
knowing that the rain had caused them to incur large fees
last year, and that it was entirely possible that the fields
would be closed in the event of rain.
How could they NOT have a back up plan for rain? How could
they NOT be prepared to refund tournament fees in case of
cancellation?
At the captains meeting to announce the cancellation of the
tournament (and the creation of a photo scavenger hunt.
Yea!) there was hardly a word of protest.
Am I the only one who finds this to be completely
unacceptable behavior by Cultimate? Will people really
continue to travel long distances for cultimate
tournaments?
I'd like to hear your thoughts.
--
Posted from http://www.rsdnospam.com
Kate
as well. I'm not sure if cultimate would have been able to
reserve turf fields, but we would have been happy to spend
an extra $5/person to cover turf if it meant we were
guaranteed some ultimate.
More frustrating than that was the lack of organization on a
broader level. First, the general time frame for getting
pre-tournament paperwork in could have been a lot better.
Second, the communication about rain delays should have been
more timely. They told us they would update us between noon
and one, we get an 'update' at 3 that says we'll get a real
update at 4. At 4:50, we get an 'update' that tells us about
a captains meeting. We spent 6 hrs waiting, when it should
have been 3 at the most. Yes, this is a big tournament, and
communicating with that many teams could be difficult. Even
so, this is something cultimate should have anticipated.
There were lots of other little issues that could have and
should have been avoided as well. If this was a tournament
run by a college team, we wouldn't have been so
disappointed. However, we had higher expectations for a
company that profits from running tournaments.
Will
year, and now they are down right stealing.
Everyone go to Pres Day next year.
Random Guy
That's why you travel long distances to go to Mardi Gras... if it gets
rained out, at least you still get to party... even if it is in the
rain, which happened last year, still awesome
tyler c
pint glasses?
The Cultimate folks kindly told us that someone on our team picked
them up,
and surprisingly enough, no one had!
Genevieve
tournaments, but this is over the top. Despite the promise
of texted updates at specific times, we never received a
call or text. We had to rely on rumors from other teams or
information passed on from our men's team. We checked the
website for updates, kept checking our email
accounts-nothing. I understand that the weather is out of
their control, but communicating is their responsibility. I
understand there are many teams and the logistics are
complicated but they are getting paid to do it.
To top this, several women's teams took the initiative to
find fields and scrimmage on Sunday (the weather was
gorgeous....guess cultimate couldn't get it together to
organize any games themselves). Props to Colorado College
for organizing this, and also for contacting the UPA to try
to get these games sanctioned and therefore count toward the
college series. Apparently cultimate is not cooperating so
no, these won't count. How they have any say in this
baffles me but I admittedly do not know the process to have
an event sanctioned in these unusual circumstances.
I sincerely hope cultimate is seriously considering
refunding all overage, but from what I gather they are not
even entertaining the idea. This is not a business, this is
a joke. And a racket. The slogan "sucking less" is not
holding true, fellas.
Reggie Fanelli
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
--hold on.
what?
seriously....
did trouble in vegas's college edition take place this weekend or not?
it was announced at the captains meeting that the 3 day 163 team event
was cancelled?
is that true.
do i have to keep reading?
damn
Reggie Fanelli
> communicating with that many teams could be difficult.
---there's a "reply to all" button on my computer.
did the event happen?
Reggie Fanelli
> should have been avoided as well. If this was a tournament
> run by a college team, we wouldn't have been so
> disappointed. However, we had higher expectations for a
> company that profits from running tournaments.
---did the tournament happen?
did 163 teams get to go and play 6 games over 3 days?
was there plenty of profit?
how many days of the event happened?
what was the format?
Reggie Fanelli
> refunding all overage, but from what I gather they are not
> even entertaining the idea. This is not a business, this is
> a joke. And a racket. The slogan "sucking less" is not
> holding true, fellas.
---hey.....three years and still going strong!
nice work cultimate.
THIS year's Trouble in Vegas will DEFINATELY attract more teams to
attend next year.
i don't know how....but i am sure more will sign on next year.
crazy.
seanc
mike,
friday's games took place. sat and sun were cancelled.
sean
sforrest
we got 3 days out in Vegas largely on the school's dime.
That being said, I'm looking forward to staying east for the
rest of the spring and participating in tournaments run by
some good TD's.
-Scott, Virginia Tech
.never got those pint glasses either
Tooth
and I'm pretty sure no refunds were given out although they mentioned
it as a possibility I believe.
Tooth
Its been brought to my attention that we got a discount for any
cultimate tournament for this season because of Rollcall last year,
which seems like a fair way to handle it.
Mimmo
is to not go to their tournaments.
They have prudently locked up Vegas(their own creation),
Stanford, and Centex. The three major tournaments in
College Open Ultimate. Centex in the womens division has
gone their own route and run great tournament (i've heard)
that's largely due to the work of Michelle Ng.
The top tier teams go to Centex, Stanford, and Vegas...and
everybody wants to beat the best teams. So, if you are fed
up with CUltimate host a tournament and convince the best
teams to go. Or as suggested, convince everybody to go Pres
Day, Mardi Gras etc. Whining about the way things are
unaccompanied by action is a favored pastime in Ultimate
though, so I don't see a lot of change in the future.
Mimmo
amount of talent from both QCTU and Pres. Day...
Emily Sanders
heard anything directly from any type of TD. Had it not been
for our men's team we would not have known anything, and
they were just going off of rumors as well. Nor were our
captains ever contacted about the captains meeting. We
literally wasted an entire day just waiting from one hour to
the next on what the deal was. At this point I cant belive
Cultimate actually consideres themselves a legitimate
company. How can you ***k up running a tournament so
terribly when this is what they do basically every weekend
of the year? I totally understnad they they cant do anything
about the weather, but we didnt pay $350+, travel 12 hrs
(and thats definitely not the worst of all the teams) to sit
on our butts in a hotel room in Vegas. We should get refunds
purely for the fact that Cultimate doesnt deserve to get
paid for doing crap. One day of play = 2/3 refund. Its only
right.
Kevin
Shame on your Cultimate for making this team sit on their butts in a
hotel room. For $350.00 you should make sure each participant is
entertained the entire weekend.
How dare you not plan for a bunch of whiny college kids whose parents
paid for them to go to private school and expect to be spoiled like
they have the previous 18 + years of their lives!! (I apologize to the
very small minority of non-rich kids who pay for their own educations
and happen to play ultimate).
Come on you whiny little bitches...the weather sucked. Cultimate
routinely puts on better tournaments than a bunch of college kids
can. If you spent as much time making the best of the situation as
you did complaining you may have actually enjoyed yourself.
In a couple years you will need to be big boys and girls in the real
world where you will be shit on more often than not. Consider this a
good life lesson!
-Grumpy old man at work, wishing my ruined weekend involved being in
Vegas with thousands of other college kids.
bil
i think that we can improve
communication across the board...
gone should be the days of
not being updated, or not
knowing when you play the
next day because the TDs
are still figuring it out.
i.e. just tweet the updates.
or tweet not knowing yet
at a regular interval -
it takes what, 30 seconds?
it's not that hard. that
goes for you, _ALL_ tournaments.
Reggie Fanelli
---my team would have gone to play ultimate.
greg
including Trouble, Log Jam, Solstice and many other great
tournaments. Those boys in Pullman, WA really know how to run a
tournament. Best kept secret in the NW
Genevieve
directly sent cultimate my feedback for Vegas, not that I'm
expecting much from that. I took a few years off to deal
with knee issues and just started coaching this year, so
cultimate was a new phenomenon for me. I'm less and less
impressed with every experience and probably will steer my
team to other tournaments next year.
Genevieve
bitter, also. We weren't asking to be entertained, in fact
cultimate spent their newly found free time creating a
scavenger hunt on the strip when I believe they should have
been spending that time finding fields for games on Sunday,
so I'd say they had that piece of it covered. The weather
did not suck on Sunday, it was gorgeous, and even Saturday
afternoon was not bad. We went to play frisbee, I could
care less about the "fun stuff". I am also not a college
student, I am a coach who has played in numerous tournaments
(and run some) including some with weather delays that were
handled in the best way possible. I'm truly amazed at the
consistent lack of organization and attention to detail that
I've seen with cultimate. I do my day job well, I coach the
best I can, I even take volunteer work seriously-I expect
more from people who are paid to run events. And my mom and
dad didn't pay a cent for my undergrad or grad education,
nor did many of the parents of the ladies I coach.
Gabriel Pedersen
Ask Bil, he fought off lightning.
Gabe
Eric Brach
In my day, the biggest/best tournaments were
Easterns
QCTU
Terminus
Yale Cup (Wow, I am old. But seriously, Yale is freakin' close to
tons of good teams in the NE/ME/AC. No reason that couldn't happen
again.)
Mardi Gras
Centex
Stanford Invite
Santa Barbara Invite
UCSD Pres Day
All 9 of those tournies still exist. Only 2 are cultimate, 7 are
not. They are all over the country. Plenty easy to go to
megatournaments, as well as -gasp- smaller, 8- to 12-team tournies
like used to be the norm, and still get great games and have a great
time.
For a lot less $.
JB
New Year Fest is another well run, well timed tourney.
JB
fiftythree
> Jon Ladd is still the best tourney director of all time.
> Enough said.
>
> > Posted fromhttp://www.rsdnospam.com
Aaah except if you count how he f'd up Big Sky Mixed
Sectionals last year as the (remote) RC by altering our
tournament format Saturday night, creating an unfair path
for bids to Regionals. Our team took the brunt of it.
moremail...@yahoo.com
being paid to do? if not, would the person paying you be a "whiny
little bitch" for being upset about that? pretty clear here that the
only little bitch on this thread is yourself!
Random Guy
Southerns is epic... we'll have to see how it goes from here on out
now, though
Jim Mallon
> cultimate spent their newly found free time creating a
> scavenger hunt on the strip
A scavenger hunt? Really? That was the back-up plan?
Mike L
substitute fields, but were unsuccessful. Which is hardly
surprising. The other large field complexes that I know of
in Las Vegas have the same shitty turf that one finds on the
Silverbowl fields. There are smaller fields dotting the city
with adequate turf to deal with the rain, but these are
sufficiently small that that one would need to set up a sort
of mini-tournament at each site--send a couple of pools
here, another pool there, etc.--that would have been its own
scavenger hunt, in a sense. Even then I'm sure they would
have had to make substantial changes to the format, probably
screwing the non-elite teams in the process.
The essential problem is that Las Vegas, if it rains, cannot
sustain a tournament nearly as large as TiV. Hell, club TiV
had half the field of college, but the back-up plan still
lead to my team only getting 4 games on one day. If it
rains, Vegas just doesn't work.
Mike L
it was only fair to re-print this e-mail I just got from the
Cu1timate team, about refunds for Club TiV. I don't know
what will happen with College, and there's certainly reason
to be critical of them, but let's try to be fair.
-----------------
All-
Refunds have been processed ($5/player) in Google, from the
original team deposit. This typically takes 3-5 business
days to go from google to your account.
Additionally, rain got the best of College TiV also and we
are literally swamped. In order to receive further refunds
(the additional $15/player for those who chose not to
attend), please respond to this e-mail with your team name
and the number of players who did not come. This is
obviously information you have all provided before, but this
will speed the process along greatly.
Again, we are disappointed about Las Vegas turning into
Seattle, and hope for everyone's sake across the country
that the weather goes back to a bit more normalcy soon.
The Cu1timate Team
Diesel
Invite, PLU BBQ, Men's Centex, Roll Call, or Huck Finn? It seems
obvious that Cultimate isn't going to change anything until teams stop
supporting them financially.
-Diesel
carth...@gmail.com
Like I said, suckers.
JB
Fish
not participating teams.
let's take the PLU BBQ, for example. this is a tournament that our
team has attended for at least the last seven years. we are going to
it again because we enjoy the tournament, the location, and the
atmosphere. i was surprised to hear that cultimate had taken over
direction of the tournament this year.
because of the upa's requirements for teams to play in a certain
number of games to be eligible for the series, we simply have to play
certain tournaments. we can't sit out of something like the BBQ this
year because we need those games for eligibility purposes.
we have decided to boycott Vegas and Stanford due to their affiliation
with cultimate, and we rejected an offer of theirs to organize a new
tournament this year, but we can only decline to participate in so
many games--we need to play frisbee.
i would hope that teams like Stanford, PLU, Texas, etc. would take the
initiative to run their own tournaments in the future. Stanford,
Centex, and the BBQ were better tournaments before cultimate came
along. telling cultimate that their services are not required for
initiating a tournament would send the message that we don't need them
in this sport, and it would allow the same tournaments to be run every
year under the traditions that have been so successful in the past.
fish
Getty
view. You can drink and live to excess if that's your wish. With the
move back to the soccer complex next year y'all would be missing out
on a great experience if you don't go. It's a homegrown tournament
run by the local organization with no outside influences. GO TO MARDI
GRAS!!
-- Getty
> > > Posted fromhttp://www.rsdnospam.com- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
Duchamanos
least 3 years. I'm not saying that you're an idiot for still going to
cultimate tournaments, but you're an idiot.
rhbi...@gmail.com
I posted a good review of Border Brawl this fall, just sayin brad.
Benda
Yeah, our team (Southern Illinois) had a good time at Huck Finn last
year. Of course the format was jankety, but we didn't care because we
got good games, and came in with no pretenses of winning the tourney.
Some teams got screwed though if they were on the outside looking in
to the power pools. Huck Finn was well run, but I definitely enjoyed
it better when Wash U ran it. The party when Wash U ran it was
awesome. Arkansas had to run a naked lap through the party, and
thunderstruck was in full effect.
That said we have to go to Huck Finn, the date is convenient, it's two
hours away and we need games to get sanctioned.
Naji
Cultimate tournament again. 2/3 of tourneys ('09 Huck Finn and '10
TiV) we have attended have been more than just disappointments. I
please ask other teams to do so for the positive future of our sport.
Regards,
Naji
Missouri S&T Miner Threat