Revenue Sharing -- What's Too Much?

OK -- here's your chance to give us guidance on the "Revenue Sharing" part of our plan.

As you should know, part of our plan for addressing revenue generation is to increase the entry fee for teams and to share the revenue between the regional hosts and the national program budget (by national I mean all expenses at the regional and national level).

Our basic formula was this (for football):

10% goes straight to the regional host as revenue.
7% goes to cover costs of insurance
25% Goes to the NCCS to cover expenses
58% is used as operational funds for the tournament. If there is additional revenue here, the host keeps it.

Additionally, the NIRSA stipend of $2000 would go to the host as support for the regional. And insurance wouldn't be taken out because the entry fee has covered it (7%). And last year, Powerade provided an additional $1000 for schools that could implement their sponsorship at their regional tournament.

Breaking this down to dollars -- in a $300 entry fee -- $30/team goes to the school. $21/team goes for insurance. $75/team goes to support the national program. And $174/team goes to support the operational costs of the tournament.

The $75/team is used to fund travel stipends or the national tournament operations costs or the regional stipends, or t-shirts for regionals or whatever other expense comes with running the national/regional program.

Please give me your perspective on "fairness" for each party. Again, fairness is not defined. Does it seem right? Is it unbalanced? What's the best formula?

Thank you.

Possible National Flag Football Tournament Formats

Historically, our national flag football tournaments have been open tournaments in which any team meeting our eligibility criteria could participate. At this moment, that's the plan for Fall 2009 at the University of South Florida.



Let's discuss some alternative possibilities to the open format.



Championship Format has been adopted by the NSC and NCCS as the tournament format we will employ in future tournaments. What does that mean? Very simply, it means that we use our regional tournament structure to determine our national tournament field. That definition provides us quite a bit of flexibility to "shape" the national tournament.



Why do we need to "shape" the tournament? Primarily because we have to control costs for these tournaments. Determining the number of qualifying teams allows us to set our expenditures, and therefore, our target revenue for that event.



Here are some options.



1) Regional Champions Only are invited to the National Championship.



2) Regional Champions are invited, along with a select number of invited teams who have participated in an NCCS regional tournament. This could be additional teams from larger tournaments, it could be historically strong IM teams that didn't win their tournament, or it could be other criteria to draw good teams from our national pool.



3) Establish a number of teams in each Championship Tournament (this keeps cost predictable), plus a collegiate open division for teams that did not qualify.

• 16 Men's Championship + 16 Men's Open


• 12 Women's Championship + 12 Women's Open


• 12 Co-rec Championship + 12 Co-Rec Open

In a recent survey of NIRSA professionals, the Championship with Concurrent Open Format was the most popular of these tournament formats, followed closely by the second option -- a weighted invitational tournament.

I like these concepts, but how do we account for the additional financial burden these teams place on the tournament (i.e. more staff hotel rooms, meals, apparel -- more player awards, etc.)?

If we can answer this question, we are much closer to implementation than one might think. Please feel free to provide input on your format of choice and an suggestions on financial structure.

Regional Fairness in a National System

One issue that needs to be resolved by the NCCS Committee is how to create fairness in the national flag football and basketball systems. Inequities are created when you have large tournaments in one region, and smaller tournaments in another, particularly when revenue is generated at these tournaments that support a national program.

For example, this year in flag football Stephen F. Austin hosted the Region 4 flag football tournament. They drew approximately 60 teams. Iowa hosted the Region 5 tournament and drew eight men's teams. When comparing revenue generated at these tournaments (using 2009 fees), Stephen F. Austin will have generated $5760 to support the national program, while Iowa would have generated $768. Yet, these two regions have the same representation at the national tournament. This is fundamentally unfair to Region 4.

What recommendations do you have to balance this uneven equation?