Jamie, I too apologize for not responding to you earlier. And I too applaud your efforts at promoting 3-cushion through your local tournaments.
The question of how the USBA can help organizers of local tournaments is an important one. And there is probably sentiment on the Board for wanting to provide some form of help. But whether and how the USBA is able to do this is the question.
The USBA has extremely limited financial resources. As things stand it is difficult or impossible for the USBA to fund all the various activities in which it does or should participate, even without supporting local tournaments. So it is difficult if not impossible for the USBA to add any expenses or decrease its limited revenues. I know your idea for the USBA to give away free memberships for your tournaments seems at first blush to not be a financial burden and may attract some players who continue their memberships after getting the free one, and I am sure we could give away a few memberships each year. But if we did that for your tournaments that would mean giving away one per month just for those tournaments. And if we did it for your tournaments, we would feel obliged to do the same thing for other local tournament organizers. You probably know that there are numerous local tournaments held around the country each year. Just to give you one example, there is a room in the Los Angeles area that runs three each week, and there are other rooms in the Los Angeles/Orange County, California area that run several each month. I believe the same can be said for other areas where there is a concentration of carom billiard players. So giving away USBA memberships for local tournaments could easily lead to a significant loss of sorely needed revenue for the USBA. Maybe there is a way to do this by substantially limiting the number of free memberships given away around the country, but then there is the question of how to fairly allocate those few free memberships among the various local tournament organizers. And if only a few free memberships are given away, will that be enough to provide the desired level of support? Also, FYI each membership that is given away would actually cost the USBA about $10 which is what it annually spends per member for mailings, membership materials, etc.
Having said this, I hope all of us will continue this discussion. If there is a reasonable way that makes sense for the USBA to support local tournaments let’s try to put our heads together and figure it out.
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