karl(east) wrote: ↑Mon Mar 13, 2023 10:36 pm
East Side Pioneer Guy wrote: ↑Fri Mar 10, 2023 12:50 pm
SEC Scotty wrote: ↑Fri Mar 10, 2023 12:21 pm
Bring back the Tournament Programs!! I don’t want to do an internet search to find who was on the all tournament team last year. Plus I kept one every year I went before the Wuhan Flu.
Yeah, I agree. I don't get it. Was the program a money loser? I guess I always thought they made money on program sales. It's a lot more convenient to quickly flip through the pages of a program than to try to find it on my phone. You'd think the MSHSL is run by public school administrators who don't have much professional experience with meeting consumer demands.
The short answer here is yes, the MSHSL was, somehow, losing colossal amounts of money on printing. (I can't find the article that described this from 3-4 years ago, but the losses were absurd.) Not sure how their printing contracts worked; common sense would suggest they could have just upped prices to cover costs, but who knows. Hockey actually held out longer than the other sports; I remember there was some comment from an MSHSL official that was kind of snippy about those demanding hockey fans and their desire for programs, so it was the only sport to get a program for a year or two. (I wouldn't be shocked if that was the only one, or one of very few, they made a profit on.) But, Covid gave them the excuse they needed to cut them entirely, and there were further snippy tweets from MSHSL people about how people who wanted programs are dinosaurs. Always pleasing the customer, that MSHSL. Someone in my group made some nice printouts with player stats for each session.
Yes, the MSHSL is quite the organization. This is a good time to recall, for the kids here, the fiasco that was the Prep Bowl in the 80's.
There was one less class then, and it was all held on one day, Saturday. The games were all held in order from 9 Man up to AA (the largest). To get all of those games in, the AA game (as I recall) didn't start until after 7PM. And there was some band performance at the AA halftime that ran so long the halftime took about an hour. By the time the game ended, it was after the ten o'clock news ended. And people complained about this nonsense for years before they drastically shortened up the half time.
By playing the AA game so late, they made their most popular product less accessible to fans. And by having the largest crowds (AA & A) playing back to back, it made it hard for those attending to get the best seats. It took the marketing geniuses at MSHSL years to figure out they need to stagger the smaller crowds with the bigger crowds, like putting Class D between A and AA.
It's a hard headed organization that learns slowly.