TOC RECOMMENDATIONS

May 1, 2011

I like the concept of the Tournament of Champions and congratulate Senior Softball-USA for the concept and the foresight to create this tournament. You have it well organized and run a first-class tournament.

After managing the ProHealth Care 75 AAA team in the Tournament of Champions, I want to offer some suggestions for improving the tournament. I played in the 2010 tournament. I was hoping to also play but suffered an injury on the Thursday before the 2011 tournament.

Since we have experienced two very cold tournaments (2010 & 2011), I would suggest you move the tournament to a later date in February. Or another idea is to move the TOC to November in Ft. Myers. This would allow the TOC to be played in the same year that teams qualified. It is a little confusing for players and managers to play a next year tournament (Winter National) before completing the previous year at the TOC.

My biggest concern for the TOC was the way teams were seeded in the double elimination phase of the tournament when you only have one team of a higher ranking (Major) playing four AAA teams.

This concern would apply to all examples of higher ranking playing lower ranking teams. This issue is more critical for the older divisions like 75 and 80.

When you use runs allowed for seeding purposes with seven teams of various ages and rankings playing in a pool, it becomes a meaningless and arbitrary number. As a result of this system the Major team was seeded 4th out of 5 teams.

In our particular situation we never played the AAA team that won our division because we were eliminated by losing twice to the Major team. This is not right.

The Major team should have automatically been seeded one and probably the fairest draw would have been for their games not to count in the double elimination as they were given their automatic first place for their division (Major) and the benefits (rings, etc) that go with it before the tournament started.

A second idea would have the four AAA teams play a double elimination bracket and the winner plays the Major team 2 out of three with both teams getting rings.

Don H. Bardonner

Manager, ProHealth Care

Brookfield, WI