The Horseshoe Tour Staff held a staff meeting on December 28, 2019 at a centralized location in Winchester, VA. We try to do this as often as we can, but this one was long overdue and as a result the agenda was quite packed. I won’t dig deep into the specific details of the meeting in this summary, as much of it is just boring administrative stuff. But one thing we did do was take some time to evaluate our own performances and make suggestions to each other for improvements… a very helpful exercise! Self-evaluation is always a good thing and we looked at ourselves as individuals and as a team, evaluating and critiquing our individual jobs outside of the tournaments, and our individual and team duties at tournaments.
One thing we’ve been lucky with, until recently, was staff tournament attendance. Up until the last couple seasons, we’ve managed to have a full staff at almost every tournament, which is amazing, considering we’re going into season 12! But seasons 10 and 11 had some absences that were not well planned, and we stumbled through some of them. So, we decided we needed to address this and work out ways to make these times go more smoothly. This will probably become more common as time goes on, so we worked on that and made good progress in dealing with absent staff. We also did a little re-arranging of the staff, bringing Barbara Taylor in officially as the Tour Sec/Treasurer and moving Tony White into a VP slot. We examined the proposed budget for 2020, the major part of it being tournament travel and we made some tough choices to help contain those expenses as best we can.
Here’s a few things that should directly interest you, the players… We took a solid look at the Open Division and the lack of entries this past season and decided that from now on, the Open Division will only be offered at new locations as a promotional tool to draw in the maximum entries. Existing sites will now only offer the two Prime Divisions, but they will be open to players of all ability levels, no restrictions. When no junior division is offered, juniors may compete in the 30′ Prime division. The minimum pitching distance is 30ft. so no 20 ft. Cadet entries will be accepted unless we offer that division separately. We spent some time examining the tournament rules and bylaws, correcting them to show all the recent changes and are preparing them for publication online soon. We previously decided that our next Hall of Fame and Achievement Awards ceremonies will be in Newberry, SC in April, so we spent some time examining that. There are no player inductions coming up, so we feel this is a good time to start non-player inductions and we will have several for this event. We will also explain the non-player categories and the criteria needed for winning Hall of Fame status for non-players, like players, these honors will be earned. Obviously, we spent a lot of time discussing the upcoming season as well. Overall, the meeting went very well, and as a result, we expect to have a well planned and executed five tournaments in season 12!
Bobby White
Horseshoe Tour President