Question: I have a tournament this weekend, and there are a few players whose membership expires on Sunday. One of them is in a section which only plays on Saturday, but the tournament goes to Monday. Is he eligible to play in this tournament, or does he need to renew his membership, and will this be handled automatically or will it require office action?
Alex Relyea
Players must be USCF members through the last day of the section that they are playing in, so someone playing only on this Saturday or Saturday/Sunday does not need to be a member beyond August 31st, but someone playing in a section that goes through Monday must be a member through at least September 30th.
However, you may run into problems submitting the rating report. If you submit it as one tournament ending 9/1, anyone expiring 8/31 will generate an error. Is it possible to enter different ending dates for different sections of the same tournament? I’ve never tried.
Yes, each section has its own starting and ending dates, though if you don’t supply them (the dBase upload format doesn’t have fields for them), it will default to the beginning and ending dates for the tournament.
Also, the starting date of any section cannot be earlier than the starting date of the tournament, and the ending date of any section cannot be later than the ending date of the tournament.
As I have discussed on numerous occasions, the section starting and ending dates are used to sequence the sections for rating, which some people seem to think is very important.
Sections that have the same starting and ending dates are further ordered by the section number assigned to them by the submitting TD