Posting player entry fee breakdown: PDGA requirements?

[dmoore1998]

I disagree. Claiming to catch a person lying is one of the strengths of the internet. Creating drama with unverified/unverifiable accusations is one of the strengths of the internet.

In any competition settings there is always someone that is unhappy about something. Giving that person/people tools to create headaches for a TD they decided is the cause of them being disgruntled is a way of life for some.

As far as catching a bad TD actually lying? I doubt it would be as obvious as you think. There are explicit items that either match or they do not (pro-payouts). It's all the things that underlie a tournament that are vague costs. How much did the TD pay for the players pack versus how much the claimed value is? The porta johns, the water buckets, the gas receipts, the signage, etc.

I haven't run events, but this thread got me thinking about the numbers--if someone wants to impart more accuracy to these numbers, please do.
You've got an event that has a total cash flow of $10-20k. Of that, only a fraction might be in the areas where additional transparency is being sought. Move the numbers around by 10% and how are you or anyone else going to know if that's right? Is a bag of ice $5 or $5.50? How many bags was that? 10,000 feet of OB rope...oh wait, most of that was leftover or re-use from a previous event. It's listed in the financials, but did you actually check the receipts?

A real and meaningful audit looking at the documentation would be required to "easily" catch the cheaters and even then it is questionable whether you could reasonably assert that someone pushed the numbers by a few (say 10) percent here and there. Throw in a few gas and meal receipts and you've moved the discretionary spending by 100's of dollars.

1. If you're running an event with $20k in cash flow, you should absolutely already be doing all of the tracking of expenses, etc. So any previous arguments about how hard it is don't really fly.

2. 100% you can fudge a few bucks for "ice bags". You can probably also get a free meal out of the deal. That's almost definitely not what people care about though. If you tell me you ordered me a takeout meal and my cost is $20...I don't care that it actually cost $19.10 and you just pocketed $.90...I do care if you told me it was $20 but it was $10 and you scammed half my money.

3. Your OB rope example is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. It's going to be super obvious to folks in the DG community if a TD says "I had to buy 10,000 feet of OB rope" and the local players are immediately like "no you didn't, you re-used the same rope you used last year". Or "I had to pay $3,000 for port-a-johns" and someone says "show us the receipts, that's not remotely what it costs for port-a-john rental".

 

[dmoore1998]

1. If you're running an event with $20k in cash flow, you should absolutely already be doing all of the tracking of expenses, etc. So any previous arguments about how hard it is don't really fly.

2. 100% you can fudge a few bucks for "ice bags". You can probably also get a free meal out of the deal. That's almost definitely not what people care about though. If you tell me you ordered me a takeout meal and my cost is $20...I don't care that it actually cost $19.10 and you just pocketed $.90...I do care if you told me it was $20 but it was $10 and you scammed half my money.

3. Your OB rope example is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. It's going to be super obvious to folks in the DG community if a TD says "I had to buy 10,000 feet of OB rope" and the local players are immediately like "no you didn't, you re-used the same rope you used last year". Or "I had to pay $3,000 for port-a-johns" and someone says "show us the receipts, that's not remotely what it costs for port-a-john rental".

For the record, this "ease of catching fake numbers" is exactly the reason I think the report is fairly unnecessary in the first place. It isn't that hard for an adult human to reasonably estimate expenses to see if a TD is roughly in line with what it should be. It would be a nice easy centralized place instead of each player doing their own analysis of the event for a gut-check. Ultimately though, it's not hard to figure out if you care.

 

[SocraDeez]

The International Tour Standards make a thousand times more sense than the American (North American?) ones. Events outside the US actually operate much more like every other sport in the world.

Perhaps more sense in terms of the increasingly outdated pro/am model. But the merch model for amateur competitive play was a major contributor for building the sport in the U.S. and boosting the payouts for pros and eventually touring players even though it was on the backs of the thousands of course builders, TDs and other undercompensated volunteers.

Debatable whether the game grew because of the merch model or in spite of it but most likely somewhere in between.. The merch model makes the assumption that players need that to be drawn to competitive play which is not what the success of every other sport in the world would indicate. Had the sport grown as a normal one with a base of amateur players rather than the idiotic "everyone's a pro" we may very well have seen more growth rather than less. We have no real means to tell.

The big difference between other sports that grew with the traditional amateur model is they were played in organized school competitions. Disc golf has been trying to figure out ways to work backwards as a breakout pro "sport" from Overalls and Wham-O support back to amateur participation/donation to prop up pro payouts via the merch model and eventually attempts to get back into schools via EDGE, Collegiates, UPlay and the High School initiatives. In the meantime, the traditional school model for sports development is becoming more professionalized with NIL payouts in the colleges and we have school aged teens cashing with not so insignificant amounts in disc golf (Gannon Buhr plus others). Interesting to see how the traditional model evolves to converge with the back fill approaches from disc golf.

See, interesting conversation does bubble in quagmires. Can anybody point me in the direction of more resources on origin/evolution of "merch. model" in disc golf? Much obliged if so.

I've read a little bit now about the history of "amateur status" in the U.S. - the modern Olympic games movement, the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), & Amateur Sports Act of 1978. And I read through the published info. for the PDGA and USGA amateur status designations relative to "merch. model" prize distribution:

https://www.pdga.com/rules/competition-manual/110

https://www.pdga.com/files/pdga_true_amateur_event_guidelines.pdf

https://www.usga.org/content/usga/h...atus/amateur-status-modernization/rule-3.html

I've been getting more into the tourney org./admin. side of volunteering over the last year - after never having played much in official disc golf competitions - and the modern merch. model for amateur status player "payouts" has struck me as a strange bit of pageantry. It's also a prime culprit for producing administrative headaches. It's not all bad, of course, but I'm keen to learn more about the history and development of the "merch. model" in disc golf competition.

 

[biscoe]

See, interesting conversation does bubble in quagmires. Can anybody point me in the direction of more resources on origin/evolution of "merch. model" in disc golf? Much obliged if so.

There's not much real info available anywhere other than talking to folks who were around at the time- it preceded my involvement.

my take:
A. All players were deemed "pros" in the earliest competitions. (factual)
B. Someone decided "some of these players should be Ams". (speculative but seemingly obvious)
C. Players heretofore called "Pros" and now called "Ams" were already indoctrinated in tangible rewards for playing well instead of simply trophies and the nickel and diming began. (pretty much purely speculative on my part)

Note that the concept of player's packages did not exist for the majority of events at that point- the transferal of a lot of the prizes for the winners to player's packages for all came later.