Craig Cutler wrote:Good question Brad, we should be able to tell soon. What the numbers will not show is how many events and existing members were saved by this change. In November, I was part of a group that was considering forming our own Tri-State tournament series. (NY,CT,NJ). We had many TD's in the discussion and on board with the change. Jeff W, Lick , and Greg W made a last minute push to convince us to focus our efforts one last time into staying with NEFA. I think those guys saved about 7 Nefa events and about 25 members. Over the last few years, NEFA basically lost Maine, and was on the verge of losing most of NY,NJ,CT. Thankfully, this small change preserved what we had, and hopefully we can grow from here.
Likewise, the Green Mountain Points Series seems to have been distancing itself from NEFA. However, there are quite a few GMPS tournaments that are also NEFA sanctioned. I'm not sure if it's any more than last year, but it's certainly no worse. I'm not sure that has led to an increase in membership though.
It will be interesting to see what happens to attendance at tournaments in the smaller regions. In NH we have just two (?) NEFA tournaments, maybe a third if Bellamy does one this year. NH States will always fill no matter what and Bellamy has a strong core of local players that will play a tournament regardless. But what happens to Beauty Hill? Without many local players, that tournament really needs to draw in traveling players to fill. Even with NEFA sanctioning, that tournament means little to players from outside the NH/VT region, and there aren't a lot of VT players that venture out of the GMPS.
