Tournament Suggestions for Next Year

[Sonny]

Tournament Director Dan Morris and I are soliciting suggestions for next year's tournament.

If you played in or attended the tournament at Pizza Hut Park, we would love to hear from you.

If you followed the action online at CollegeLAX, we would also like to hear from you.

Feel free to post in this thread if you have a comment, would like to make a suggestion, or if you have some constructive criticism to make things even better for the participants, the fans, and the online visitors.

We may not be able to respond to all posts, but we will definitely be reading!

[Zamboni_Driver]

Pertaining to the consulations games, obviously there are varying opinions and perspectives on these games (i.e. "they don't mean anything" verse "it is bush league not to play them"). One act that I think supports the role of the consulations games, but doesn't comprimise MCLA requirments, and reduces the work load of the volunteers (potentially the most important) is to simply not provide on-line statistics/scores of those games. Post the consulation match-ups either pre-determined or selected by coaches, and let the free-will of the boards post the scores and reports.

[laxfan25]

While I was only able to attend the Tuesday evening games, the strangest thing to me is that I have never seen a lumpy, wavy artifical turf field like they had on Field 2 for the Duluth/Sonoma game. In another thread it mentioned that PHP is aware of the issue and is trying to correct it for next season. Someone blamed the heat, but to me it felt like there wasn't proper compaction of the base layers. Definitely weird, and I wondered if it affected the players at all.
Other than that it seemed like a terrific facility with all the fields very close together and a right-sized stadium for the finals.
Someone told me that like five years ago the city of Frisco barely existed! One of those instant towns - put in some developments and big-box shopping centers and voila - a new city!

[jmaxwell2]

Please move my hotel room closer to the fields.

[CATLAX MAN]

I still think that there is some merit to reducing the number of consolation games by 1 (2 game guarantee) and have an all-star game comprised of players from the non-semi-final teams. This should also reduce the cost (officials & fields) and the amount of work on the volunteers.

[Danny Hogan]

i think a thursday senior allstar game would be a great idea.

[Cat Gut]

I thought that overall the tournament was excellent. The main stadium was a fantastic place to watch a lacrosse game. Everyone involved in making the event happen is to be commended. I was however, surprised by the low turnout of fans. Was the event not promoted locally or was there just not much interest? I was under the impression that lacrosse was growing rapidly in Texas and expected to see a lot of the local youth players. There were very few. The majority of the gate seemed to come from the tournament players and their families. I got the impression that the tournament wasn't promoted very well.

Also, I understand that stats were being kept. I for one would have liked to have been able to look at them. Is there a way to post them online?

[Ballin']

i know it might be to early to ask this, but is it going to be back at pizza hut park next year?

[x1dschm]

i think a thursday senior allstar game would be a great idea.

I second this idea. Cut the consolation games by one and add the "Senior Showcase" or "Tournament All Star Game."

I'll let you sort out the details, but I think it's an awesome idea.

[horn17]

I thought that overall the tournament was excellent. The main stadium was a fantastic place to watch a lacrosse game. Everyone involved in making the event happen is to be commended. I was however, surprised by the low turnout of fans. Was the event not promoted locally or was there just not much interest? I was under the impression that lacrosse was growing rapidly in Texas and expected to see a lot of the local youth players. There were very few. The majority of the gate seemed to come from the tournament players and their families. I got the impression that the tournament wasn't promoted very well.

Also, I understand that stats were being kept. I for one would have liked to have been able to look at them. Is there a way to post them online?

i think this has always been an issue...its hard to generate intrest, and promotion is usually done by the local comunities....maybe we look at marketing it a bit differently....

[jmaxwell2]

I thought that overall the tournament was excellent. The main stadium was a fantastic place to watch a lacrosse game. Everyone involved in making the event happen is to be commended. I was however, surprised by the low turnout of fans. Was the event not promoted locally or was there just not much interest? I was under the impression that lacrosse was growing rapidly in Texas and expected to see a lot of the local youth players. There were very few. The majority of the gate seemed to come from the tournament players and their families. I got the impression that the tournament wasn't promoted very well.

Also, I understand that stats were being kept. I for one would have liked to have been able to look at them. Is there a way to post them online?

I also would like to be able to have access to all of the stats for all games.

[MountaineerLax]

Perhaps a more electronic fashion of the stats is in order.... laptops are at the tables already, why not look into using one of those programs that i've seen BYU or CSU using?

Entering them into the system rather than on notecards stuffed in Ethan's pack. (ha ha! who said bush-league? That's how the NFL does it!)

You could then provide those stats electronically to the coaches.... even by quarter's-end.

At the very least it would provide a coach with reliable stats.... i've seen some awful stats being fed to coaches.

[Texas Logger]

I thought that overall the tournament was excellent. The main stadium was a fantastic place to watch a lacrosse game. Everyone involved in making the event happen is to be commended. I was however, surprised by the low turnout of fans. Was the event not promoted locally or was there just not much interest? I was under the impression that lacrosse was growing rapidly in Texas and expected to see a lot of the local youth players. There were very few. The majority of the gate seemed to come from the tournament players and their families. I got the impression that the tournament wasn't promoted very well.

Also, I understand that stats were being kept. I for one would have liked to have been able to look at them. Is there a way to post them online?

Texans, especially those in high school, are just not very interested in MCLA lacrosse. The club stigma is a huge sticking point. Which is funny because I know more than a few guys who got into club ball after trying DIII, heck even one guy who walked on at Ohio State. This might be a relic of the times when private schools dominated the high school landscape, in that the MCLA schools were just not attractive options for whatever reasons.

Grassroots marketing would be the easiest thing for the MCLA, and I think that the communities and fans in places like Minnesota or Colorado would be much more receptive than Texas fans.

The thing that struck me was that there was a youth game played in the stadium on Saturday (maybe Friday) and none of them stuck around to watch the games. They might have been told to clear out, because admission was being charged, or whatever. I'd say it's int he best interest of the MCLA to let the kids and their families stay and watch for free. Free tickets should definitely be offered to local organizations.

At least spam laxpower, because Texas kids seem to love that site.

[Highheat]

From a player's perspective, i thought that the late evening game-times during the first two rounds created a bit of a difficulty. We played back to back 7PM games, which was nice as far as the heat was concerned, however the sun goes down in the second quarter, and ends up being at eye-level at certain points on the field. I don't know that there were a lot of plays which were adversely affected because of this, but i know that i was squinting and looking really hard for some of those passes... It could also have been a bigger issue for the goalies, although i'm not sure if any of them had issues with that.

My solution would be to either keep the games during the day, despite the heat, or to push the games back to 8PM in the evening to avoid any of the lighting issues.

[KnoxVegas]

I filled out the sheets, what is done with the stats after that is not up to me.