Sorry for the confusing topic. I couldn’t think of a concise one. Last night we had a new player show up for our club tournament that went from 3 July to 31 July. He was renewing his membership from 1995. Anyhow, after I finished my game I rushed home to get his membership into the system so that he’d be a member for July, and it went through at 11:55. What are the rules as far as this goes? Specifically, what would have happened if I had waited until today to do the membership, and therefore he hadn’t been a member for all of July?
Perhaps Mike will correct me, but I believe that as long as you submit the membership before the rating report, it will go through. Players often join or renew after the start of a tournament, and certainly not all TDs submit the memberships before the tournament ends.
I have been able to renew a membership as late as after the tournament report has been uploaded to be verified on-line; i.e., I upload the files and they go through the verification process, but the verification fails. Why? The tournament cannot be submitted yet because one player is not a member. I make that player a member (new, renew, …) via the TD/Affiliate area on the web and get the report re-verified. The tournament report now passes verification and I can submit it for a rating.
So it appears that as long as all the players are members at the time of the rating report submission/verification then you are OK!
Then what about the reverse situation? If a tournament is held in July but submitted in August, will it still go through if one of the players expired at the end of July?
Memberships are checked against the ending date of the section.
As noted, if the player is a current member, the section will pass validation even if the player was not a current member at the time the section was held.
If a player is a member through July 31st and the section the player is in ends by July 31st, that player will be considered a member for that section and will pass validation, even if other sections of the tournament didn’t end until some time in August or if the tournament isn’t submitted until some time in August.
In general, we do not back date memberships because it can get complicated. (For example, we don’t know when the TD collected the membership, just when it was submitted to the USCF.)
We do have that capability now, but we use it mostly for subscriptions where the subscriber (usually a library) wants to get back issues as part of that subscription.
We do occasionally get requests from members to back date a membership and get back issues of the magazine.
Yes, it will (as it should). I just tried an experiment to verify this. I uploaded the rating report for my club’s July tournament (ended 7/28). There was at least one player whose membership expired 7/31/2009 and who has not renewed (according to MSA). The validation report gave me alerts for each section that the section might be a duplicate of an already rated event (which was true). However, the event was “ready to submit” with no membership issues. (Of course, I then deleted the duplicate report without submitting it.)
(Edit: Sorry, Mike – your response appeared while I was writing this.)
I had an experience with this last year. We had a tournament that was 31 August and 1-2 September (or whenever Labor Day weekend was). In any event, there was a player who played in a section that was only the first day, and his membership expired on 31 August. There was no problem getting that section rated.
So if I’m reading this correctly, the rating report will go through if a player is either a current member when the rating report is submitted or a member as of the ending date of the tournament.
OK, but I don’t think I’ve ever run a tournament with sections ending on different dates. If they end on different dates I consider them separate tournaments, though I suppose you might combine them to weasel out of the minimum rating fee. A subject for a different thread, however.
This leads to a question I wondered about a long time ago. What constitutes a “tournament”? Same location? Same dates? Same format? Same number of rounds? For each of these, I can cite some “tournament” for which they did not apply. To further complicate matters, in some cases I thought they should be considered the same tournament, while in others I thought they were separate tournaments masquerading as sections. Is there a better rule than “I know it when I see it”?
I think sports like swimming may have the right idea, a ‘meet’ consists of a number of otherwise independent events at various distances, strokes, individual/relay, etc. (There can even be separate events by age.)
But it is the meet that brings the participants together, not any one event, with some participants there for some events and not others.
By contrast, a side event (such as the various side events at the US Open) is something that may even be a rated event (like simuls and lectures) but is generally not the reason that people came.
The Brits call them “Congresses.” What bothers me philosophically, though – is a player in an U1000 section, playing a different number of rounds with a different time control in a different building, really in the same tournament as a guy in the Open section? Is this qualitatively different from playing in a 1-day tornado at the same site?