The 2019 Elvis Festival artwork was released last week as a watercolor painted by Sue Scruggs. It is a view of Elvis standing in front of a pink Cadillac …
For the Fling with the King disc, the text was deleted and background expanded, and tournament information added with a clearer font. The art poster made a beautiful transformation into a disc.
When: Januar6 26, 2019 @9am
Where: Basileia Church, 801 Highway 371, Mooreville, MS 38857
Charity Event: Proceeds go towards the church’s mission trip to Kenya
Format: Head to head bracket with Double elimination, two puts from various distances
This is a fun event with
You may think I’m talking Shakespeare, but I’m really referring to tournaments here in the South! A common question these days is, “Will the SN survive”? Is it to be, or not to be? No one is certain, but it does continue surprisingly well. Yes, it’s glory days certainly seem to be in it’s past but why does the question as to it’s survival continue?
It’s directors, of late, have leaned more towards ineptness than actual leadership. Good leadership is the most important factor for the survival of any organization. After leadership, communication is the next most critical lifeline. The SN scores poorly in regards to both these aspects. Don’t get me wrong. I am not against the Southern Nationals. I’ve worked diligently to assist in it’s survival. It’s been around for many years and I’ve enjoyed playing, hosting, and directing it’s sanctioned events. It’s a wonderful organization of volunteers promoting disc golf here in the South. It needs to continue. It’s time to begin communications to insure this happens!
To me, it just doesn’t seem to be structured properly to survive in today’s ever changing “give it to me now”, instant gratification culture. It’s Board should embrace and acknowledge the web’s importance in the advertising of tournaments, talking smack, the points race, and viewing results online as critical aspects of the SN’s past success and it’s future. Without these aspects online, it likely would not even exist today. The SN is approaching a crossroads that could bear significant influence on it’s future, even it’s very existence.
As many of you know, I along with past SN player, Kary Rogers, have been performing the recent grunt work to get the SN domain obtained and transferred from it’s creator, Brian Moon. The SN Board had lost contact with Brian as he ventured on to other interests. He had become partially “off the grid” in regards to SN disc golf and maintaining the web site. Thus, the SN’s desire of obtaining “rights” to the site and gain its control to keep it updated. Over a period of many months, I was able to make contact and obtain the server files. Brian graciously offered them as property of the SN and worked with us to make the transfer in January, 2015.
Kary worked wonders on the code and the site was transferred with little down time or noticeable changes. Quite a feat for code written fifteen years ago. The next step was to tweak the site and introduce up-to-date code and new pages per the requests of the SN community. Tupelo Disc Golf Leagues, in fact, was created as a demo area to test and review possibilities for new SN pages and features.
However, anytime a complete site is transferred to another server, issues are likely to occur. Although all seemingly went fine, we’re now observing that the old code of the forum creates excessive page executions and overburdens the server. Much of this is due to massive amounts of hits from spam bots and search engines, but the old code and huge size of the forum database is the main culprit. Our ISP has quotas in place and the end of the month outages of the site are due to exceeding these quotes.
What do you think? Take this brief poll and express your opinion.
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The SN desperately needs a new site both in terms of the tournament database, informative pages, and a cutting edge forum. However, such a site does not magically appears without expenses. Customized code, plus time is involved. Neither of these requirement come cheap. The SN does not deserve a cheap site either.
The original basis of the Southern Nationals is it is a “Player’s Series” run by the players on a volunteer basis. All proceeds generated via it’s tournaments are supposedly be returned as payouts at it’s various championships. Yes, it’s a great premise, but it does have it’s challenges. These challenges turn into faults over time, and faults normally lead to failure. Therefore, in this authors opinion, the SN needs to adapt and change in order to survive.
Check back for part II of this topic as I’ll explain, in my opinion, needed changes for the SN to survive and thrive.
The attached page documents one of the Southern National earliest championship tournament. It pre-dates the SN tournament database and uses a logo of which few are familiar. See anyone you recognize?
Disc golfers love their sport! They truly do, They love it. They certainly know it’s addiction. They have a mutual desire for it’s growth and prominence within our larger sports communities. However, most just want to play, compete, and improve their game. Tournaments abound and are available to satisfy this need to compete. They are enjoyed by many at some point in their playing career and definitely the best means in which player’s may gauge their skills.
When hosting a tournament, our local club, and I assume others in our area, normally debate on how best to advertise and insure the best quantity and quality of players attend their event. For this reason, most tournaments are sanctioned. Here in Mississippi they are sanctioned by either the Southern Nationals Disc Golf series or the Professional Disc Golf Association. Sometimes both! However, there are pros and cons to both of these sanctioning organizations. The PDGA is rigid, cumbersome, and not user-friendly when it comes to their sanctioning procedures. But mainly, it’s quite expensive. The SNDG, on the other hand, is more player friendly and less expensive, but lacks organizational leadership, goals, and a true sense of forward-thinking directors. Both organizations hamper tournaments with mileage restrictions. There are other aspects for each of these organizations but that debate is far beyond the scope of this particular post! And yes, these are but one individual’s opinion but talk on the courses tends to relay similar opinions.
Why sanction at all? The reasoning behind the development of our online scoring system is that promotion of the sport truly starts at the local level, right? Tournaments normally draw the highest percentage of participation from within thirty minutes of the event. Why would clubs bite into continually sending local dollars to some third-party organization where a there is a very low percentage return to the club or it’s players? Wouldn’t promotion of the sport be served much better if clubs could promote events, run leagues, and offer an overall points series W-I-T-H-O-U-T the expense of sanctioning? These savings could be passed to the players either by lower registration fees or higher payouts. Yes, a couple of sanctioned events could be considered for larger tournaments that may have a larger draw of player interest, but the bulk of local events could be kept non-sanctioned at huge savings to clubs and promoters.
While the PDGA squanders local dollars and the SNDG languishes into oblivion, I believe it is up to local promoters to advance the sport with regularly offered leagues, and to continually reach out to their local park department and school administrators to further develop the sport’s community presence so they too, also offer it within their intramural sports programs. Therefore, please keep loving disc golf. Keep promoting it. Keep the dollars locally, and keep the events growing!
Whether you just want to play or if you want to promote … just do it. We hope our online system assist you either way!
Ten years of discs …. Elvis Fling with the King disc golf tournament!
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The Elvis Festival creates an annual Elvis poster and in which a custom Elvis tournament disc is designed. I have had the pleasure of tweaking these designs and creating a custom disc to be used for the tournament. The above represents the first ten years. May many more follow!
🙂
