Tourney: WHBPC 2011: Seattle 08-11.09.2011

• If you're short on cash then you can just do the prelim tourney.
  
• Or why not put time and effort into convincing the Euro body to allow your own scene to host one of the qualifying tournaments? That way it costs you diddly squat?
  
• Or why not suggest that the Euro body fundraises a small kitty to help fund the minority of cash-strapped polo players to get to the tourneys, anything's possible.
  
  
  

A Euro body would actually help you to organise yourselves at a national level (you'd have rules, statistics, contacts, cross-polination of ideas/experience), where as the country-first approach is not as useful (and would likely lead to arguments as each national body competed for control of the Euro body).

I pondered all this with a few folks when looking into the UK body thing, my conclusion was that the only benefit to a UK body at this time (for London) is a fiscal one (unlocking funding by becoming a recognised sport or by being absorbed into an existing sports/activity/community association). The recognised sport thing won't happen any time soon.

Personally I think bike polo players and the sport in general need more time to experiment and try things out (whilst retaining some control) before making that kind of jump, the Euro body has loads of benefits and kind of gives us an "official" (or democratic) way of organising things and deciding on rules without many negatives. We kind of do the Euro-thing already through the magic of the internets, it would just have more of a structure and core-group of representatives to collate all the input/ideas/decisions.

We can also have big worldly arguments with the Americans about rules and stuff, joy.