30-03-2015, 06:58 PM
Keith - I was chatting with a few guys about this at SNCL yesterday. Main messages I heard were that people are generally happy with teams of 8 and keeping it a prestige event. One interesting suggestion was to relax the player eligibility criteria. Some players may be keen to play but find their club is not able to field a team and so these guys are stymied in current setup. So idea would be they join up with whatever club sees fit to offer them a board. Obviously some controls will be needed to ensure no unethical parachuting in of stars at the 11th hour. Publishing team pools before the start of the event should cover this. Probably some detail needs worked out like how many players to allow in a pool, how to deal with players dropping out through sickness or moving away etc. Still this doesn't sound unworkable. The key point is in a single stroke we tap into a wider pool of players who are, by definition, keen to play. So we cut the risk of defaults and may even grow the event by adding some completely new teams. In a sense we have seen a similar evolution in SNCL where many teams are an amalgam of clubs (Dundee, Fife etc) or even just collection of friends. SNCL has grown to 5 divisions which shows there a fairly large community of players who are keen to turn out at least one day in their weekend given the opportunity.