onlooker wrote:Sftball Junkie wrote:Keep in mind Gary’s ASA Tournaments is a business for him and has nothing to do with Mizuno All American. He was running tournaments before and will be in the future. All American has there own tournaments they are hosting and they have nothing to do with Gary.
Correctamundo! in the past when Gary had NO affiliation and Mizuno was not given the luxury (it appears) of being put in a pool prior to a blind draw (read that again, put in a pool PRIOR to blind draw, which has nothing to do with stacking a trny for easy voctories, it ONLY ensures a path NOT against each other). Now that he has affiliated himself with (insert ANY FRIKIN ORG NAME HERE) Mizuno, the radar MUST be on to ensure pool play is kept random (at least that is MY belief).
Most likely in the past this was actually done prior to the pools being set. Your radar just was not up.
Prior to getting into Softball with my girls I ran baseball tourneys for Youth Travel Ball as well as some Adult Ball. It is common place if you have enough teams in a specific age group to take teams from the same Org and split them up prior to pulling the pool play random draw. Not sure how Gary does it but the way I would have done this in our current day situation would be:
If we only have 3 pools Mizuno would be put in a hat. The first 3 teams pulled would be split and the 4th team would be thrown into the single team random pull. If we had 4 pools the All American teams would each start in one pool. then I would take other Orgs who had multiple teams in the same age group like Breeze, Heat, Hype, Grapes, Smash, etc... each orgs teams would go in there own stack. I would draw 1 name and 1 pool number behind it to make it random but ensure these org's did not have to play each other. Then all other teams would get drawn. As a TD it makes the draw a pain however it works.
Again there is 2 sides to this. If you split them before you draw you are showing favoritism, yet since no one ever sees the random draw, If the random draw places the best team in the org against the worst you are padding it for the team who is the best to give them the #1 spot on Elimination Day.
I have had Baseball Orgs in the past request to play each other in pool play on Sat so they did not play each other early on Sunday. Since we are talking about Mizuno I will use them as the example. The last thing Mizuno Noe wants is to Play Mizuno Garcia at 8am Sunday and be done for the day. If they are in different pools in a straight bracket (No Gold Silver) this happens a lot with the young team vs the older team on elimination day. Again 2 sides. Are you helping the #1 team in the org by splitting the Org teams on Saturday when there is a good chance the play the younger team at 8 am in the morning on Elimination Day?
TD's are a lot like Ump's they are screwed no matter what call they make
