This will be my last post defending the venue for D1 or how the tourney was ran. I’ll try not to repeat what I wrote on the “$3 parking” thread, but I do want to address some of your concerns. Deeohh, I appoligize that your table was left out on the hospitality. If you refer back to my other post on the “$3 parking” thread you’ll see that we did put a lot of food out. We had planned on your table runner(s) taking care of getting you food from the hospitality room, or at least giving people breaks to use the bathroom or visit the hospitality room. We gave out 5 floor passes per table and it only took 3 to run the table. It must have been poor communication on my part. I do know that many table workers took advantage of the hospitality room….some actually cheated the process by taking their pass off and giving it to their kids to get fed; which was not the intended purpose.

I do think that $2.50 for a bottle of water was too high. However, water cleared the bag checks…so you could have brought it in. The Expocentre, much like other big venues, contracts out the concessions. In Topeka that company is Heart of America. When you have a contract for concessions as a business plan it makes since for you to protect your exclusive rights in your contract…that is why the Expocentre has the bag checks; they are required to do it in order to be in compliance with their contract with Heart of America. The new venue under construction in Wichita will have the same parent company as the Expocentre in Topeka, so I would not look for it to be any different.

I will close by saying that YES you paid $3 to park and YES you may have purchased water at $2.50 a bottle. But, I think most of you were sitting down to dinner in your own house on Saturday night. Dinner on the town was optional and not mandatory…we were done wrestling at 2:30pm not 8:00 or 9:00 at night. I personally think that was a good trade, you can make up your own mind. My point is that I hope you take everything into consideration as you make your decisions as to the quality of the venue or the effectiveness of the management team involved.

I am planning to start a thread to thank our key supporters in this weekend events. But for now this will be my last post in defense of what we accomplished or how it was managed. Deeohh your help was appreciated...I hope you vollunteer next year, thank-you. We are listening and hope to make next years event(s) even better. Good luck at State!

Mark Stanley
jrvikingwrestling@yahoo.com