I am a Local TD, and most of the smaller tournaments I’ve encountered in the past few years are submitted for rating right away.
I’m wondering about large tournaments… what are the more typical reasons they sometimes take over a week to be rated? I can imagine lapsed USCF memberships and the sheer volume of the number of games are some of the more common reasons, but what others are there?
Also, if you find a player has a lapsed USCF membership (due to an error in registration, presumably), how do you find them to get it corrected?
If a player pays for a membership renewal or tournament membership by check, and if that check is made out to the USCF, it has to be received by the USCF before the event will be rated. I’d imagine that’s a common one.
In the large tournaments I’ve directed, all memberships are checked during the first round (small tournaments, those can be checked during registration). Expired members can then renew their membership between rounds using a new browser window on my TD computer. Never had a problem with that process.
The only delay that would take a week that I’ve seen is lack of personal time or laziness. A day or two is one thing…a week is something else, given that it’s 2011.
In some large events, esp. scholastics in which a school district is purchasing a large amount
of the new memberships, and requires a verified list of those memberships before cutting
a check to the organizer, processing can take a week or more. Many organizers simply
do not have funds, often exceeding $ 1,000 to pay up front.
Credit card numbers for memebrships that are invalid, CC numbers on memebrship forms without the control code from the back, missing information for membership - or information that does not match what is on file.
It is great if one can check that while the tournament is going on. But if one does not have internet access, or is one of 2 TDs running a 300 player scholastic event, then it is hard to resolve there.
I have called players/parents on memerbship issue and had 1) no response for a week because they took the kid out of school for a week and went to see Mickeys Mouse 2) grandparent had a heart attack and no one was home for 3 day 3) Dad left the cC but put Moms phonenumber down and they don’t speak to one another and the number she had for him was changed 4) they renewed at an event earlier in the week and that TD had not processed his memberships yet - and did not for 5 days afterward 5) the TD who entered the initial membership had the wrong birthdate and we had to get with the office to clarify things and they had a snow storm and were largely closed down for a few days.
Once I had my own wife and one kid get sick the day of a large tournament and I was playing single parent running the well ones to school and nursing the the sick ones.
There are lots of reasons - the regulations call to get it in within 2 weeks. Lots of times I get rated the same day or the next, but things happen sometimes.
Take today’s event for instance. I have 340 players in 3 separate tournaments, one a team tournament, the two others individual, drawing from all over our state. There are about 20 USCF membership issues, 650 or so games over 15 sections. there are just lots of odds and ends that can happen. Plus I started today at 6:30am and will end it after 9pm. If there are issues I will not be able to contact coaches at schools until Monday. But then some of our districts do not have school on this coming Monday so then it would be Tuesday.
The point is just this - there can be a lot of things that delay reporting a tournament a few days.
Just ran the Illinois K-8 State Championship this weekend. We were down in numbers by over 100 kids this year at 517 players. Rated about an hour after trophies. bnasc.org/PAIRINGS%20AND%20STANDINGS
Wonderful - glad you don’t have memberhsip issues. I still have several to resolve from Saturday and cannot submit the event for rating until those are completed.
Just a couple things we did that helped “discourage” problems.
We used an online registration system - and sold “tickets” for current USCF members, expired USCF members, JTP players, and JTM players.
I monitored ticket sales for the last month, verifying the membership status for each registration. We did “sell” 12 JTM memberships - charging them up front as a part of their tournament fee. We had early registration discounts, charged $15 more for registration the night before the tournament, and took no registrations the day of the event.
We heard no complaints about this method, and the players and parents were very appreciative of starting on time at 10:00 am Saturday, and leaving at 5:00 pm Sunday. We have a great team that has worked together 10 years at this point.
In our state school teams cannot participate as a team in any event that runs into Sunday wihtout special permission due to state school rules. So our events have to wrap up in one day, unless they have no “team” relation.