If anyone else suggests / insinuates that more people arriving early somehow helps the problem in any way shape or form, I may have to tape down my caps lock key. This includes the idea that not arriving early means people didn't "deserve" to get good seats. Again - 15,000 people do not fit into 3,000 seats. It doesn't matter when they show up.
We were there at 6:30am on Sat. and 5:45am on Sun. arriving early really did not help. All it did was allow us thru the turnstiles at 7am to go to the Milkhouse and wait until 7:45am when they opened the door. Sunday was a little scary, the ropes weren't set up and the crowd got larger and larger more pushing happened. The thought of getting trampled crossed my mind. While we were standing at the doors to get in on Sunday the WWoS worker said that ticket sales exceeded the venue almost six times over. You can't tell me they didn't see this coming just off of numbers on Sat. Not five minutes after opening the doors at least the first 10 or more rows from ground up were completely filled. I am all in to purchase my seat, I pick the row and seat, and I would pay more for it. Rather do that then risk being hurt to get a good seat.
As perverse and counter-productive as it sounds, the only band-aid to the overcrowding at this point is to make the event much less attractive to the fans. Moving popular divisions away from each other, moving awards to different locations, putting popular divisions at inopportune times, and severely raising the price of admission could all decrease the problem a bit. However, treating the athletes and spectators this way goes against the stated mission of the USASF. Those fans are what can save this sport and/or make it much more mainstream. The governing body of the sport should be doing what it can to savor, nurture, and increase the number of fans & spectators - not trying to find ways to turn them away.
There are people in the industry who have predicted this very thing would happen. Many have been practically screaming for a venue change for years. By 2007, the venue was already to small. The only real solution is to move the event.
Assuming you can't move the event, here are other minor solutions that don't adversely affect the athletes or families.
1. Get rid of the VIP area. The people that are actually "very important" are the parents and athletes, not the event producers, choreographers, or board members. Use that space to improve the viewing for family members (see #3)
Many of the people that were seated around me said the same thing much of those seats weren't used a good portion of the day.
2. Live, real-time scoring with a leader board outside. Make use of the technology available and have huge screens that are constantly putting up information like what was on the google doc, but make it a fun and entertaining atmosphere. Have a MASSIVE screen showing the live feed from ALL arenas. Have live feeds from the warmup room and behind the backdrop. Think block party with high-tech scoreboards. Make it fun enough for the casual fans to prefer to be there than at the actual event. Make it informative and high-tech enough to make many hard-core fans prefer it as well.
This could be easy for Disney to do. They already stream into the ball field why not make that area an attractive place to watch the competition and not the same price as being in the actual venue.
3. Get a much better control on who is in the "fan" group that gets to sit down in front or stand in the fan zone. I only recognized about 1/2 of the people that jumped into our "parents & family" group that go to sit down in front of the stage. This should be reserved for ACTUAL family members. In our experience, there were far too many non-family, non-CA members that rushed in and kept the actual parents from being able to see. I'm sure other gyms experienced the same thing. We greatly appreciate our fans, but I'm sorry - the parents, brothers, sisters, and other athletes from our gym should get priority over others when our own teams are going.
Also, if parents/athletes are GUARANTEED to get the best view of the their gyms' teams by being in the priority group, then many will be happy just being in this group and not planting themselves in a seat all day long.
This is why I felt I had to arrive so early I wanted to KNOW I would have a good seat to watch and prior years had taught me to arrive early. Many parents can't do this, and shouldn't be expected to.While we were in line some were even joking about camping out. I wouldn't put it past some of the fans,USASF and Disney really needs to think this out. If this is to be the venue in the future.
More to come as I think of them. Feel free to add your own.
