Pickleball Magazine 1-5 | Page 19

PICKLEBALL TOURNAMENT REGISTRATION BY MELISSA MCCURLEY / WWW.PICKLEBALLTOURNAMENTS.COM A re you familiar with how tournament directors structure their events, set their policies (refunds or inclement weather), or set their registration limits? Are you signing up too late and tournaments are already booked? There are many tricks to the trade in order to get in early so that you won’t be left in the dark. In the pickleball tournament world, registration for tournaments opens at midnight in the tournaments local time zone. Some tournaments set limits for each event while others allow their tournaments to fill in based on the most demand. Have you had to stay up until midnight or set an alarm to make sure you were able to get in to a tournament? We see this happening more and more with the large national events and in other large tournaments where registrations are filling up in days, or just a few weeks, and in some cases, even minutes.  This has people asking, what can we do?   The fact is the game is growing faster than there are courts or court hours or volunteers or referees to handle events.  The best any of us can do is plan our tournament calendar early.  This means planning your budget and lining up your partners so that when registration opens you are prepared to completely register on opening day.  By completely registering, we mean register, pay and have a partner.  With the rapid growth, gone are the days you could register, not pay, not have a partner and still hold a spot in the tournament. Here is just a small example of how much pickleball tournaments are growing: From a pickleballtournaments.com perspective, in 2014 we saw 93 large tournaments. In 2015, we saw 130 and in 2016 we are at 240 and counting.  Inside these tournaments, we are seeing growth anywhere from 10% to 50% and in some cases 100% in the following year.  In the case of the Fall Brawl, when Little Valley went from 12 courts to 24 courts, the event doubled in size instantly.  This is an example where the number of courts and court hours was a limitation and now doubling the number of courts is still not keeping up with the demand. We also saw the USAPA Great Lakes Regional go from 250 participants in 2015 to 350 in 2016.  This is an example of how much pickleball is growing in the midwest. Likewis