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Forum Friday: MCLA Woes

Welcome to Forum Friday! With all the great talk going on in the Lacrosse All Stars Forums, we want to give you the chance to join in on the conversation and let your voice be heard. Each Friday we will showcase one of our Forum topics for you to check out and join in on.

This week, lax nation is all about discussing the 2013 MCLA Championships – both good and bad:

Editor’s Note: This forum post started out a little differently, but we like the direction where this user as taken it. Constructive discussion on what is going on in Greenville. SoCalLax2 is making great points and offering some real solutions.

SoCalLax2 posted the following:

I am going to play devil’s advocate here for a minute and respond to some things.

A: With all due respect to the nice facilities that have been used in the past, given the nature of the MCLA (and the niceness of the fields used in the first round games) I don’t think Greenville is a problem. A city welcomed our league in, for free, and really was/is it so bad? Do we need to pay 100k or whatever for a nice stadium full of empty seats? That just makes us look like a joke. I watched St Thomas vs Liberty with a buddy of mine at my house and his first response was “dude why are the stands so empty?” We had that at Greenville too, why pay for a nice park when the fan turnout is going to be what it is?

B: I once had an argument about the TV stuff with JP and he actually said that it was really too expensive to be putting the games on cable and when I talked about the advertising revenue etc. he explained how negligible those really are and how much money the league loses for airing the games. Why not increase your website’s traffic while saving money? For that matter why not get LAS and the other online venues involved to push traffic to the MCLA site for the streams? Do a liveblog during the games like we used to do in the past. Get everybody involved.

C: Agree the social media wasn’t used well enough to garner more fanfare but to be honest given all of the glitches in the matrix with what the MCLA had for the streams and stuff, probably better not to spam FB/twitter/etc only for those people to bitch about the feeds and what not. I had my laptop set up with an HDMI cord into my big screen HDTV and my brother walked into the room wondering which tournament this was (he played lax in HS and likes to watch the NCAA stuff) and when I told him he goes “Oh no wonder the quality sucks and it sounds like shit. Let me know when the NCAA games are on.”

I don’t think that its necessarily the venue or the decisions made that are the problem but rather the execution of it that should be harped on. What the MCLA should do is take some of that money, and do a “game of the week” every few weeks, with the staff responsible for the games at nationals as the crew, and use that as a means to get the glitches out of the way with streams and tournament facilities type stuff if their plan is to staff and stream the games themselves instead of outsourcing. (not to mention it gives us pollsters some actual video content to use in our deliberations rather than just going on resumes and banter, am I right guys?) Do the SELC tournament at Greenville, have the MCLA host it, stream the games, and use that as a test run for everything, or have the MCLA guys at the conference championships of a few conferences and do it there, whatever is most convenient for the league without shelling out too much dough and still having a chance to make sure everything is a go before just doing the tournament blind. There is plenty of time leading up to the next tournament, no need to use the DII morning games as the test pig for it.

Also, since we have live video coverage and what not, we should be doing all of these games live on the MCLA site (whats the point of even having that available if nobody uses it) with the stats and stuff so there is a fallback in the event any video cuts out. Between live video, blogging options, and the live mcla.us backend option, we have so many ways to attack this with innovation and instead we get less than standard content.

What do YOU think? Is it really as bad as everyone is making it out to be? Want to add something to the conversation? Click here.

Have something to say? Join the Lax All Stars Forums today and let your voice be heard!