Background:
A pool hall opened up near my home, and i started going in to watch the action. The players ranged from semi-pro to banger, with perhaps 30 players who regularly competed in the weekly tournaments.
The hall had weekly 8-ball, 9-ball, and 10-ball tournaments, as well as occasional 1-pocket, and sometimes individual money grudge-match tournaments between the top four players in the area.
I noticed that there were a number of college students that would come in to play with friends, but didn't take part in the weekly tournaments. Some of these college kids had suitcases with six cues so seemed to take it seriously.
I approached a number of these students and asked if they would be interested in a league open only to students and recent graduates, and all expressed interest. They didn't want to compete with the local players and thought a student league would be a better social and competitive atmosphere. (When i was in school, the universities all had billiards leagues with regional and national tournaments.)
I set up a web site where students could register their interest.
Then i approached the room owner and suggested i could post signs at all the different colleges pointing them to the registration site and we could see what level of interest we could generate.
The room owner recognized that this area has more than 100,000 college students, so there was a good potential to have a student league of say, 100 or more players. There could also be high school leagues.
However, the room owner wasn't actually interested in managing the league or finding someone who would.
The idea died.
Proposal:
1. I think there's still potential for college and school leagues, but it takes someone to be the champion and see it through.
2. But even for normal everyday leagues, every pool hall in the area has a website and a Facebook page, but they are rarely kept up. Some haven't had updates in three or more years. Some have frequent updates but it's only for drink specials, or time specials.
3. For halls that have weekly tournaments, only a couple of them will have a Facebook post announcing the tournament. But none of the local rooms ever announce the winners, or how each player did. You have to go to the hall and look at the sometimes illegible paper bracket. I've also seen local tournaments that would post an image of the bracket midway through the tournament, but then not provide the final results. And of course, the images were frequently dark and blurry.
4. When bigger tournaments are announced in the local area, it seems to always come down to emails to register, and internet transfers to pay for everything. That doesn't seem to be a problem, but it's apparent from the postings that it's a royal pain for the organizer to let people know they're registered and that they're paid up.
4. i think it would be useful to have a web site where leagues could:
5. I have a URL and a business hosting package that's sitting empty now. (set up for ASP.net on a national ISP).
6. Software. I don't think i want to write the code, but maybe there are already open source packages available?
7. For this to work, there needs to be a champion who has to
8. This is a big task. but there does seem to be a core group in every town that does manage leagues and tournaments.
9. If the system were free, and easy to use, and allowed a variety of different leagues and tournaments, then even small social leagues (Pea pool, Cribbage) would fit in and increase the social aspect. There may be only a small group of people who might be interested in Rotation or 14.1, but with a central repository, it might be a lot easier for these people to find a home.
Is this an idea worth pursuing? Has it already been done? Did it fail or succeed?
Regards,
gerryf
A pool hall opened up near my home, and i started going in to watch the action. The players ranged from semi-pro to banger, with perhaps 30 players who regularly competed in the weekly tournaments.
The hall had weekly 8-ball, 9-ball, and 10-ball tournaments, as well as occasional 1-pocket, and sometimes individual money grudge-match tournaments between the top four players in the area.
I noticed that there were a number of college students that would come in to play with friends, but didn't take part in the weekly tournaments. Some of these college kids had suitcases with six cues so seemed to take it seriously.
I approached a number of these students and asked if they would be interested in a league open only to students and recent graduates, and all expressed interest. They didn't want to compete with the local players and thought a student league would be a better social and competitive atmosphere. (When i was in school, the universities all had billiards leagues with regional and national tournaments.)
I set up a web site where students could register their interest.
Then i approached the room owner and suggested i could post signs at all the different colleges pointing them to the registration site and we could see what level of interest we could generate.
The room owner recognized that this area has more than 100,000 college students, so there was a good potential to have a student league of say, 100 or more players. There could also be high school leagues.
However, the room owner wasn't actually interested in managing the league or finding someone who would.
The idea died.
Proposal:
1. I think there's still potential for college and school leagues, but it takes someone to be the champion and see it through.
2. But even for normal everyday leagues, every pool hall in the area has a website and a Facebook page, but they are rarely kept up. Some haven't had updates in three or more years. Some have frequent updates but it's only for drink specials, or time specials.
3. For halls that have weekly tournaments, only a couple of them will have a Facebook post announcing the tournament. But none of the local rooms ever announce the winners, or how each player did. You have to go to the hall and look at the sometimes illegible paper bracket. I've also seen local tournaments that would post an image of the bracket midway through the tournament, but then not provide the final results. And of course, the images were frequently dark and blurry.
4. When bigger tournaments are announced in the local area, it seems to always come down to emails to register, and internet transfers to pay for everything. That doesn't seem to be a problem, but it's apparent from the postings that it's a royal pain for the organizer to let people know they're registered and that they're paid up.
4. i think it would be useful to have a web site where leagues could:
a. register tournaments, with venue and timing information.
- players could just connect and see what local tournaments are happening and where. Sort of a small scale local version of what you get on AZB.
b. have people enter their names to participate, and be able to see online that their dues were paid.
c. post results. Maybe not something as elaborate as Challonge, but just a straightforward simple results page and maybe a ranking page.
d. maybe email notifications for local tournaments, league results, tournament results, so it's less annoying having to chase the info down.
5. I have a URL and a business hosting package that's sitting empty now. (set up for ASP.net on a national ISP).
- I can provide the hosting for free.
- My hosting package has 50 x 2GB of MS-SQL and 50 x 2GB of MySQL available database space. I can provide some of that free as well.
- My hosting package has unlimited traffic allocation.
6. Software. I don't think i want to write the code, but maybe there are already open source packages available?
- I have seen some local leagues in California, where they were running home grown software.
- When i first pursued this idea a couple of years ago, there were paid league management packages, and that might be better just to ensure the support is there.
- But for these LM packages, the killer was that all of them wanted something like $15/month/player.
- I think that's a big hurdle for smaller halls, and would think a system would need to be free, to encourage local halls, leagues, and tournaments to participate.
7. For this to work, there needs to be a champion who has to
a. get room owners to register their venues
b. get players to register their contact info.
c. for local leagues, have league managers set up the data online.
c. for local tournaments, have tournament managers keep the data updated.
8. This is a big task. but there does seem to be a core group in every town that does manage leagues and tournaments.
9. If the system were free, and easy to use, and allowed a variety of different leagues and tournaments, then even small social leagues (Pea pool, Cribbage) would fit in and increase the social aspect. There may be only a small group of people who might be interested in Rotation or 14.1, but with a central repository, it might be a lot easier for these people to find a home.
Is this an idea worth pursuing? Has it already been done? Did it fail or succeed?
Regards,
gerryf
