Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Ed Usher on Reservations Courtesy

To league players,

The success of our program is overwhelming. One of the measures of this success is the lack of available court times.

We received numerous complaints about a few players monopolizing the courts. If you don’t remember, it was just over 2 years ago that the reservation system limited player reservations to one per week. We prefer to avoid reinstatement of this one-reservation rule. To help in this cause, let’s all limit our reservations to one 90 minute reservation per day. Specifically, let’s have no “back to back” reservations of one court by the same people, unless you have 8 or more players. If you need to play more, take the 8:30 p.m. time, the lights don’t go out until 10:30 p.m. so you can play 2 hours with this reservation. Or on weeknights, you can usually show up early for the 7:00 p.m. reservation and get more playing time.

Our goal is to maximize the number of people who get to play platform tennis each week.

I am optimistic that we can abide by this policy without having to modify the online reservation system. A few reported examples from last week, of reservations made by league players that we should be trying to avoid:

Tuesday: 4 players reserved one court at KLM from 7:00-10:00pm
Thursday: 8 players reserved both courts at Burns from 7:00-10:00pm
Thursday: all 4 courts at KLM were reserved by the same group from 7:00–10:00pm
Sunday: Multiple reservations for 3 hours, all day long
Sunday: 3 courts reserved at KLM by one team for Sunday evening but only two were used, leaving one vacant
Sunday: Court reserved at Burns during prime time evening, no one showed up
Sunday: One court reserved at Burns and one court reserved at KLM by the same guys at the same time. Even the most avid of us players can’t play that much.

Also, if you have made a reservation and cannot use it, please delete the reservation. Except for emergencies, this should be done at least 48 hours in advance to allow others to make plans to use the court, with weekend reservations being canceled by Thursday night.

Ed Usher
HPTA Representative, Traveling Teams