Deranged? You be the judge

Jonathan says "no thinking adult would be deranged enough to put himself through such misery." Let's put that theory to test with the e-mail I just fired off to the tournament director (names have been changed to protect the innocents).

Mr. Moneybags,
I’m writing to express my displeasure over the handling of the cancellation of this weekend’s “baseball tournament.” As the parent of a participating player, I invested heavily in my son’s participation in what appeared, initially, to be a first-class tournament. Had I known that we would return home having completed just one game, I wouldn’t have bothered.

I have read and understand your refund policy and I know you can’t control the weather. But having directed a much smaller tournament of my own earlier this spring, I believe we set the standard for doing the right thing for participating teams. In our case, a mid-week snowfall threw a major wrench in our plans and left us scrambling for playable fields. Our major venue would not let us play on Saturday, so we switched to a single-elimination Sunday-only tournament. Meanwhile, we refunded $75 of the $175 entry fee and $50 of the $100 gate fee. Additionally, we pledged an additional $50 refund to any team that only got to play one game.

Rather than pocket the proceeds from a weather-shortened tournament, we opted to pass our savings for field rental and umpire pay back to the participating teams. This was very positively received and, I suspect, will cause many teams to return to our tournament next year because they know we’re fair.

With 300 teams from 10 states in your tournament, perhaps public relations is less of a concern for you. I know our organization will think twice about sending any of our teams to your tournament again. For $375, we could have played a lot of games at home and saved our parents and coaches the expense of hotel rooms, meals and gas.

Again, I know you can’t control the weather. But there are things you do control that were mishandled, in my view. I repeatedly called the rainout line Sunday afternoon (during the nicest weather of the weekend) only to hear the same message over and over – that the tournament would resume at 3:40 p.m. (During this time we ventured a couple miles up the road to 3and2 where a tournament was in full swing.) I monitored the Web site constantly and no updates were posted (and still haven’t been).

Only after our team went to the complex at 7 p.m. for an expected 8:40 p.m. resumption of an earlier rain delay did we discover the gates locked and no sign indicating what was going on. (The locked gates, by the way, were only slightly more unfriendly than the message we received Sunday morning that we had to leave the park “unless we were buying something.”)

Again, I called the rainout line to discover a message had been posted at 6 p.m. announcing the tournament’s cancellation. So there we were, 5 ½ hours from home, stuck with hotel rooms for the night and no games to play.

I’d have had no complaints if we had played four games – like three local teams. I wouldn’t have even objected to having three games under our belts, like eight teams in the bracket. But our team and another local team only completed one game. (Perhaps instead of a four-game “guarantee,” you should sell it as a “best-case scenario.”) The Razorbacks, at least, didn’t have lodging expenses to fuel their disappointment. But couldn’t more have been done to ensure each team got at least two games?

To add insult to injury, our first game wasn’t scheduled until 6 p.m. Saturday. I understand that you were probably trying to accommodate our travel needs, but we had booked hotel rooms for Friday night and were ready to play first thing Saturday morning. (Fortunately, we were able to cancel those rooms, but the point is we were ready to go.)

I’m asking you to make an exception to your refund policy. It’s the right thing to do and it would send a message to our organization that you run a fair-minded tournament that is worthy of our participation.

Sincerely,



Lonnie

P.S. It sure seemed like a great day for baseball as I was fueling for the 342-mile drive home at 10:45 this morning, pumping another $60 into the local economy.