I've had a good bit of time to think on this in airplanes and sitting at home with a dead Internet connection. It makes a bit more sense to me now. I'm not sure if every one will agree with it, I'm not even sure if I agree with the approach, but the intent may not something with which I disagree:
The ARI and The Jack each require State Championship proclamations for competitions with fewer than 50 teams. This is not news. One of the questions out there is "why?" I asked it myself a few weeks ago, and the answers didn't seem to justify the requirement. Their soul purpose is to allow "smaller" competition winners to qualify for these events, but they are literally meaningless outside of that. To me the question of "why?" still remains.
Apparently, the issue has been made even worse. Some competitions in California are unable to obtain these proclamations. This hurts the GCs of those competitions, and KCBS wants to do something about it to help them. Who says the KCBS doesn't look out for the West coast? Apparently the Sam's Club locals did not get proclamations either, but I have a personal opinion that that is on purpose. It shouldn't come as a surprise that the board member who made this motion is one who has a career of organizing competitions as a contractor, including some of the Sam's Club events. Perhaps he feels, as a professional organizer, things would be better without this requirement.
Those of you who have read my posts before are no doubt aware that I am pretty detail oriented and very good at reading things and enterpreting the literal and implied meanings...you have to be to do what I do professionally. Anyway, I see the following interesting points made in the original KCBS motion and the eMail which AR sent out:
1) The KCBS BOD made this decision specifically to "punish" the AR and Jack for requiring the proclamation. This is a pissing contest with KCBS trying to bully the other organizations to do what they want, and it may be what one director wants to improve his career.
2) KCBS did not decide to stop providing winners to AR and BF. They decided to stop tracking the state championship designation. The official reason is that it takes too much work to track it, but according to the made and passed motion, the KCBS should still be providing winners to them. It's just up to them to determine state championships on their own. I call BS on that. It's a check box, or should be. Garry Howard can correct me if I'm wrong, but it should be about 750ms of work per competition to continue to track this. At 400 competitions per year, we are literally talking about five minutes over the course of a year to manage whether or not every competition is a state championship. The rest would be on the same report of winners, so no extra time. See above.
3) Based on the letter that went out, while the KCBS should still provide a list of winners to the AR, The AR is getting the list of winners themselves directly from organizers. Is it because the KCBS is providing less than they should based on the above motion? Or is it the AR giving a collective F-you to the KCBS? I don't know, but it shouldnt be that hard. Have the organizer send a copy of the proclamation to the AR before the event, and use the KCBS website to track winners....or have the KCBS provide the winners to you as they have agreed to do.
This thing is a mess with hidden agendas and subtext all over it. Unfortunately, it appears that the ones who are going to miss out are the organizers and the teams involved with those that have proclamations: The ones who care the most. I think the requirement for a state proclamation is silly, and I would not be upset if it went away, but I don't think that the KCBS trying to manipulate and force that to happen is the best approach.
Flame on....
dmp
