May - June 1999
| Vol. 10, No. 3

When worlds collide! Think twice before you try to run a tournament on the type of shoestring budget that most markets will bear. Even if you're motivated by nothing less than undying love for the game, you're still liable to hear nothing but grief ...

WANTED: Tournament Director
First Requirement: Thick Skin

How thick? Get a load of this ... Colin Callahan is a investment advisor with many avocations, two of which are racquetball and raising money for the American Cancer Society. Several years ago, when the American Cancer Society Racquetball Tournament (hosted yearly at a club in Annapolis, Md., in honor of a local player stricken with cancer) needed help with management, Callahan stepped in.

Callahan foresaw a win-win. He would be a volunteer director. The tournament was for charity. No money would go into his pocket. All proceeds would go the the Cancer Society. The players would understand this, of course, and conduct themselves accordingly — courteous, dignified, appreciative. Yeah, right.

Last year, a teenager played a forty-something in the semifinals of the open division. No one else was willing to referee, so the job fell to Callahan. After missing a shot, the teenager mumbled a profanity, which Callahan didn’t hear. However, forty-something heard it.

“Did you hear that?” he yelled at Callahan. “He said F***!” People in the crowd snickered. Forty-something was not known within local racquetball circles for his genteel manner on the court. His complaining about profanity was on par with Dennis Rodman complaining about body piercing.

Callahan, however, didn’t laugh. This was an event staged for charity. A family event. Children were within earshot. Yet, here was 40-something yelling a profanity and demanding that Callahan give a technical to the other player. Callahan refused. Forty-something walked off the court and Callahan forfeited the match.

“I’m shocked by what upsets people at these tournaments,” Callahan understates. His reaction differs little from tournament directors who try to make money for their efforts. Charity or for-profit, it’s all the same.

Racquetball players can be gauche at times and tournament directors must absorb the flak. Invariably, the source of the problem is money.

In the case of 40-something, he tried to make amends with Callahan, who immediately suspected a con. Was 40-something truly repentant about his behavior, or simply upset over disqualifying himself from the prize money? Callahan didn’t ask. He stood by his decision.

Any tournament director with experience has a bevy of similar stories to tell. Annie Muniz, President of the Texas Racquetball Association, has run, as she says, “Lots of tournaments ... probably too many.” She started seven years ago and learned a few tournament management principles on the fly, such as to always to check out the facility thoroughly. Last year, she didn’t exhaustively examine the club hosting the state singles. At tournament time, with 330 players passing in and out, the air conditioning proved woefully inadequate. Before long, the court walls dripped with moisture.

“All 12 courts were bad,” Muniz says. “There were people threatening to sue.”

Sue? You bet. It’s the money, stupid!

“The players don’t understand that we (tournament directors) work for a living,” says Muniz, an accounting manager for a gas company. “We’re not getting rich running tournaments. There’s no money any more from sponsors. It’s all the entry fee. And if we make $300 from a tournament, that’s a lot.”

“The reality of it is that our players have become spoiled,” says Mary Lyons, who directed roughly 90 tournaments in Florida from 1985 through last year. “They have come to expect a shirt, a two-foot trophy, and three meals a day, all for a $30 entry fee, and they still complain. The economics of running a tournament doesn’t support that any more.”

“Racquetball players do expect alot,” says Jim Hiser, associate executive director for the United States Racquetball Association. “What other sport feeds its players daily, organizes their social activities, lets them play in as many as three divisions in some events, and also gives them a nice souvenir?”

Muniz is convinced that most of the complaints voiced by players stem from ignorance. They don’t understand that a $30 entry fee disappears faster than a patch of snow in July. There’s the shirts, the awards, the catered meals, the club rental, the prize money, and the liability insurance.

Liability insurance? Muniz carries a policy on herself just because of racquetball. Here again, it’s mostly about money. If she kicks an open player out of a tournament for misbehaving [understand, Muniz takes no guff; she wears a shirt emblazoned with “Racquetball Police Woman”] that means the player loses prize money and therefore income. At such times, Muniz is not a popular woman, tournament director or not.

Even when players win the money, they complain. A few years ago in Annapolis, the open division champion confronted Callahan about the amount of prize money. He received $300; the second-place player, $150. The difference should have been greater, he told Callahan, more like $400/$50.

Callahan was stunned. The tournament was for charity and this guy was complaining about $100 in prize money? “I just laughed,” Callahan says.

However, even the beginners can present problems. Muniz recalls a D level match a few years back when one player became incensed with his opponent’s hinders. The next time they were close on his backhand, he swung his racquet into his opponent’s leg, and broke it — the leg, that is. It was lawsuit time.

“He finally dropped the suit,” says Muniz, “when the guy who hit him was banned for life.”

“There was a time back in the ‘80s when Miller would give us 10 kegs of beer and the players didn’t care how much they paid or if they lost,” says Lyons. “No more. Now there is little or no beer and there’s some jerk that says, ‘I can’t believe you’re charging $30 for this.’”

Second Requirement: Deep Pockets

Doug Ganim of Ganim Enterprises, Inc., in Columbus, Ohio, ran his first racquetball tournament 18 years ago, when he was a teenager. He was hooked.

“It was the excitement level,” he says. “It was so much work built around a deadline. Then the tournament would come off and at the end of the weekend, we felt we had accomplished something.”

As a sophomore at Ohio State, Ganim started the Ohio Super 7 series—seven tournaments in seven months. The next year he landed a Coors Light sponsorship. His seven events per year grew to 16. He was able to make enough money directing tournaments to put himself through college and graduate school. Life was good.

Ganim is one of the few tournament directors left who runs an event for more money than he can stuff into his hip pocket. But even he is discouraged. Back in 1983, a Super 7 tournament typically drew 250 entrants. A similar tournament today draws half that.

“It makes it easier to run a tournament because there are less people,” he says. “But it’s not a benefit I enjoy having.”

With participation decreasing, Ganim and others have been hesitant to increase entry fees. In fact, entry fees have been nearly flat for two decades. In 1981, first-event entry fees for one of Ganim’s tournaments was $26. This year it’s $29.

Small wonder that Mary Lyons gave up running tournaments last year. Near the end she was ecstatic if she could pocket $2,000 a year from tournament proceeds. When she figured in the time she spent coordinating with the club managers; preparing entry forms; arranging for trophies, shirts, food, and dumpster pick ups; setting up the draws and the score cards; running the tournaments themselves; and then accounting for the money, she estimated she earned less than a $1 an hour.

“There is a enormous amount a work for very little money,” she says. “There isn’t a tournament director out there who is getting rich.”

Not entirely true, says Ganim. Directing tournaments won’t make you rich, but you can make money if you can tap into sponsors’ deep pockets.

“Without sponsors, the whole thing falls apart,” he says. “In my tournaments, I would only break even without sponsors. I make my money only through sponsors.”

“If you want to make money, you can’t do it with entry fees and sponsors within the industry, such as Penn and Ektelon,” says Hiser, who ran a Super 7 of his own in Michigan from 1975 through 1988 with much of his profit emanating from Budweiser sponsorship. “You have to get a major, outside sponsor.”

At the larger, national tournaments, sponsors are even more critical. At the Promus U.S. Open, which Ganim has run for the last three years, sponsors account for nearly four of every five dollars of income (the rest comes from entry fees and ticket sales). But the U.S. Open is a chicken-and-egg scenario. To attract the free- spending sponsors, Ganim must stage a spectacle of live music, laser light shows, and cheerleaders. Yet to stage such an extravaganza, Ganim must have the money from sponsors.

At the local level, where laser light shows are out of the question, sponsors come along about as often as midnight sunrises. And once landed, they tend to slip away in five or six years.

“It is a very tough sell,” says Hiser. “But to make money on tournaments, to get the sponsors, you have to approach it as a business. That’s why Doug (Ganim) does so well. It’s a business to him, and there are not many others like him.”

Instead, says Hiser, 99 percent of the racquetball tournaments in the United States are run by directors who do it as a sideline, perhaps to help out the state racquetball association or the club where they play.

And that’s precisely the rub: directors who run tournaments as an aside meet players who compete in tournaments with unrealistic demands. The former get nothing but aggravation and financial headaches, and the latter, says Hiser, “just keep expecting more and more.”

It’s like the player who thought he deserved more prize money for winning a tournament staged for the American Cancer Society. On the superficial level, it’s funny, on the deeper level, it’s sad.

But on any level, it’s not a healthy sign for racquetball.