Another trivia season is over with, and there’s some time to think about what my next battle plan for the team will be. My team played in a league championship game Saturday that shaped up to be the most hellish experience of all of my trivia experiences. The bar we played in was overly crowded (backs of most of the chairs touched other chairs), the place was understaffed, and the full AV capabilities were not available to more than half of the players there (technical difficulties).

It was so bad that one of my teammates, who has experience with hooking up AV equipment, actually tried to offer his assistance when they were trying to get the screen in the back room to display the Power Point slides. But the quest was eventually abandoned.

And to top it all off, we had a shitty game and blew big points. Yeah, these things happen at some tournaments.  But they didn’t have to happen in a place this f—ing far away – or a place this crowded.

I NEVER want to drive more than an hour to a trivia tournament again.  I’ll do a 30-45 minute ride to a game – even a regular season game. I’ve done 30 minute drives to Milan for a few seasons because I like the trivia scene at OG, like the country drive and like the small town vibe, since I grew up in a small town. But anything more than an hour’s drive for a tournament is just too much. And I feel some of the west division teams were kind of bamboozled this time around by having our tournament scheduled in East Lansing – which in good traffic, is about an hour and 15 minutes from my home. And this doesn’t count time to find “city style” public parking at a meter or in a structure.  A street closure also snarled things up, as well as a street fair event that helped eat up precious parking spaces, meaning some trivia players found no room in the structure when they arrived. When we arrived at our structure, there was a pileup of cars because the automated ticket machine had glitched out and wasn’t letting anyone get in. The first passenger in line had to call the phone number on the ticket machine to get someone to come down and tell “HAL” the parking bot to open the pod bay doors. Which eventually happened, thankfully.

I really, really hope the trivia league finds a way to avoid inconveniencing their loyal, longtime players in this fashion again. Many of the teams playing in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, Saline and Milan (all west division teams) have been playing for YEARS. Don’t punish them by making them drive more than an hour to a tournament, I say! The teams in this division have been very loyal and dedicated to this trivia company, some of them for going on 10 years! My team has been playing with this company regularly for almost six years now (our anniversary is Feb. 15, 2012). Now that gives you all plenty of time to think about a present to buy for us! 🙂

I’ll keep an ear to the ground and see if any changes are on the horizon before committing to a battle plan for next season. But it does look like I might try qualifying my team in the central division instead of west. I mean – where’s the farthest I would have to trek to a tournament? Farmington Hills? That’s do-able. In fact, I know the roads around there pretty well from my past job as a journalist.  Livonia is even more ideal, it’s about a 30 minute drive, depending upon where in Livonia we’d have to go. Again, completely do-able, and I know those roads, too. East Lansing? Uh, no…I didn’t go to college at MSU and have no nostalgic reasons for wanting to visit this town. The closest I ever want to come to “visiting” this town is maybe stopping in at La Senorita for a meal while on my way to visit in-laws Up North. Or maybe popping in for a lap dance at the Deja Vu (JK)!