What lessons have we learned from the SPOON?
1. A central authority is needed. Granted, we didn't get terribly bogged down in negotiations and discussions and stuff, but a strong guiding hand is called for. A strong guiding hand doesn't have to exclude the basic self-organizing thing, but we did run into situations where one team wouldn't schedule a game. Also, how to handle new teams that weren't organized prior to the start? I think we handled it well for the most part, but I think a strong guiding hand could have done it at least as well, and also faster. We also had a great bunch of players, and a few people that took the lead when it was needed to push stuff through (can we give Lack an award for that?
). But there's no guarantees that this will always be true, or that it was or ever will be true that there will be enough leading types to do this stuff. There was also a lot of not-stepping-on-toes-trying-to-be-nice, which is good for what it is, but a guiding hand that's willing to step on toes to get things done would be very useful, especially as long as it tries to avoid stepping on toes and only does so as a last resort. 2. Timeframe.
A month might have been too long. The first two weeks saw lots of action, and every team (with one exception) showed up and played a few games. I think this makes it wildly successful, whether or not it ultimately completes its actual goals. But attendance and participation during the first couple of weeks was both tremendous and heart-warming. The last two weeks dropped off a bit, and then inaction for awhile. So we might try a month again, but realistically expect all the energy to come out early and dissipate quickly. Clearly my month and a half was too long, from that point of view. There's also the added problem that April is a bad month for many college students, and let's face it, college students were a large proportion of the participants. Some high school students, and finals are usually late april/early may. School definitely pushed me out of the competition.3. Tournament structure. For this particular tournament, and how quickly it finally came together, I think the structure we settled on was too complicated. No specific suggestions, just that we consider other tournament structures besides major american sports leagues.
Tournament structure and duration are linked, also. It's entirely possible that a 1-month tournament with a maximum game commitment of 3 games per player would have been more successful than our 10 game commitment (7 seed games + 3 playoff games). Just keeping in mind that these two variables are related, and changing both at once might be a recipe for disaster, or at least not knowing which change worked and which one didn't.
4. Scheduling. I found it astonishing that the players I play with in the middle of the North American night were suddenly only able to schedule games on the weekends, even though on any given day there were usually enough players banging around from several teams that games could have been played. We didn't allow for spontaneous match playing. On the one hand, this meant that players knew when the games were being played and would never be faced with "I didn't know because you guys just did it and I wasn't around, I wish I'd been there". On the other hand, more games probably could have been played if we'd allowed for spontaneous match playing. I won't try to guess how many more. Also, we ran into pretty serious problems scheduling across continents. I'm definitely interested in breaking up future tournaments by continent, since most of us seem to play at local night, people on each continent can play each other for whatever title is available, then the winners of the titles would play each other for the Grand Title. The advantage this provides is that the load of scheduling cross-continent is only carried by a few people who are theoretically determined to win the Grand Title, so have more incentive to work at it. The disadvantage (potential) is that continents might have different sized leagues, so it might be harder to win in one league than in another. Of course, I wouldn't suggest formalizing it by continent. Rather, you'd have the midnight->6am UTC league, and then 6am->noon UTC league, and so forth, and players would sign up for the league they want to play in based on what time commitments they can offer. That gives you teams with similar time commitments for all players collected together where they can play each other. Also consider the possibility that the Grand Title is won by an all-star team instead of the league champions, where participants in each league nominate players from within the league to the all-star team to play for the Grand Title and may come from a variety of teams. (Which reminds me, my son's being put up for the all-star team in his tee-ball league again. Yay!)
5. Team organization. Teams were self-organized and it worked nicely, in all. I think we could improve on it a bit. A central authority can set hard numbers on players per team, and make decisions on what to do if there's an odd man out that wants to play, or whatever. I'd like to see the old draft round brought up, where team captains would pick from a pool of players, one at a time, and try to construct the best team they can while competing with other teams for the players. Not saying it would work, just that I'd like to see it. The same central authority can also set soft and hard deadlines, and make the undisputable call for teams that organize late, or not at all but are kinda drafted by the other players (Formerly Elite, anybody?).
Anyway, I think we could reuse this team organization method pretty safely, but I can't help but think we could improve it. I'm just at a loss for what to do to improve it other than stretch it out a bit.All in all, I think it's gone well. There was a lot more real participation after things got going than I expected, and definitely fewer forfeits. And it was a great bunch of players all the way around that allowed things like substitutions from available players to avoid forfeits.
Lots of sportsmanship shown, good games to be played, all that stuff. The collective here and on the grid can give itself a pat on the back for a job well done, I think.
) and play regulary once per week at the same time. 