Falcon, your comment on Monday forfeits is spot on - this just completely destroys the credibility of the event as a "tournament" - many teams just treat their pool games as practice games then don't come Monday.

So really, what's the point of the tournament - just organise practice games for interested teams at local stadiums and everyone would be happy.

Which brings me to the second point - MSAC is a ridiculous venue for this event at this time of year - parking is hard enough at the best of times, for this weekend it is next to impossible to get in and out of the place due to Grand Prix setup. MSAC should not be used for large events the weekend before the Grand Prix.

So back to previous comment - run organised practice games at local venues so you can get home between games and everyone would be happy.

I agree...a number of the Champ teams don't even turn up as it is so close to the season. It really has become a tourney for the D1/D2 Teams and even then they aren't interested in paying on the monday as they have to train on the tuesday to prepare for round 1, really becoming a wasted weekend. (I old Frankston Tourney was better set up!)

I think as a whole the Tourney is great but they need to have it run at least two weeks prior to the season starting and not at MSAC!!! The GP works are on and little to no parking is avaible and a number of roads are closed.

Why not try and run it in Feb as a round robin with no finals and each team plays 2 games each day

Tiger Watcher - a number of the Champ teams ? How about most, I think there were three teams in Men's Champ ?!

And the women's Champ division had the two Under 18 State teams as entrants ...

Great for them to get the games in preparation for U18 nationals, but again the reality is these are practice games, they are not preparation for the season against opponents from your competition.

Anyone at Big V listening ???? .....

Particularly hilarious was an opinion piece on their site last week remonstrating clubs not showing at the tourney. Yet the author's club, who he coaches for, had a team not show for finals......

MSAC is incredibly hard to get a park at.

General concensus here is that the Tournament is a great idea but needs better timing and a better location is required.

Hopefully somebody at BigV HQ can take this into account.

Can anybody tell me much about the teams?

Who did Bulleen SCW have? I hardly recognised any of their players... A couple from last season and Lauren Pearce is still there but can't recognise anybody else.

Falcon, Boomers SCW have a few back from last season (including Lauren Pearce), three stepping up from Youth League, plus a few newbies to complete the team.

In reality, not going to be that competitive in 2012, but looks to be about building for the future.

To support that theory, Youth League team is chock full of Bulleen juniors - with a healthy stream coming through from VJBL over the next few years.

Pity there aren't other fringe WNBL players that come back and play Big V ... but I guess even the fringe players still go off and try to play SEABL.

I know you guys reckon the timing is all wrong, but they still get significant numbers don't they? What keeps the teams coming?

The numbers are mainly thanks to the Youth League/D-League teams competing in the tournament. In the Championship Division there is hardly any teams and Div1 and Div2 there certainly isn't as many as there could be had the timing been better.

Plenty of teams entered the tournament in the youth and division leagues. Only 3 and 4 in the men and women State Championship comp.
Tournament organisers told me it is held the week before Rd 1 so the Big V can fit a 18 round season on the calendar.
Teams had the option of saying they were unavailable for finals on the Monday and it is unfortunate that the teams who did not show up had said previously they were available.

I get them wanting to hold it all at one venue, it used to e held at Frankston, then that overflowed to Langwarrin.

I don't get any tournament where you give teams the option to tell you they won't be playing finals. That is poor.

Sounds to me like the clubs need to collectively tell the league what they want from the tournament rather than the league giving options.

Talking to a SCM Big V coach last night he mentioned that teams in his Division don't really want to play the Tourney as more than 2 games in a weekend at that level and with the bigger bodies can take a week to recover from and being so close to the season you can't afford guys to be sore and miss session in the week before round 1

Definitely agree that the tournament needs to be held around 3 weeks before the season starts. Not only giving the 'older' bodies a chance to recover, but to give coaches a chance, and enough practice sessions, to make adjustments to things that are highlighted from the games before the season starts.

1 week isn't enough considering you wouldn't be able to go too hard on the Tuesday, especially if your season starts with a double header.

So I took the bait from HO and went to have a read of the "opinion piece" on the Big V Web site.

And I have to agree that the article is somewhat amusing on a couple of fronts ... not only the point already made about the author's finger wagging ... but really, the whole PR thing seems out of whack with reality.

It's called the "Big V tournament" - but as had already been mentioned a number of state teams take the opportunity to play some games.

And what has not been mentioned is that particularly in the Youth divisions, many SEABL clubs enter their D league team.

Personally, my child plays in a Youth League team and of the four pool games, two were against Big V teams and two were against D league teams.

This is not a problem as such, except to point out that this is not a Big V tournament - it's a tournament organised by Big V in which various teams are invited to enter.

Along with the issue of the "don't come Monday" teams, this seems to further emphasise the point that this is really organised practice games, so in this format you can't really admonish any team that chooses not to participate.

Re SEABL D league teams ... I should have added that including D league teams may well be a stepping stone to the integration of Youth League and D league ... is that still happening ... 2013 perhaps ?