by glyn aidan » Sun Dec 28, 2014 11:04 pm
The park I came from in Goldenvale, Caradoc Hold, for many years actually has healthily supported a two-day field week. The primary field day is officially on Sunday, with what started as an alternate night for battlegaming on Thursdays that quickly turned into a full-scale regular field day.
It IS a feasible model, and it actually allowed for a lot of flexibility with attendance and work schedules with players and officers alike.
Things that can happen when you have two regular, full fields a week:
-Your officers can't always make it to every single field, both days, true. But that means that if there's a week that they can't attend your primary field, so Sunday for instance, if they can make the other field day, then they can still attend Amtgard that week and have a presence.
-Same thing goes for players- they have an extra option for a day to attend field. At my old park, a lot of us worked retail jobs and couldn't take Sundays off regularly- which meant that we COULD attend Thursday nights (our field started between 11pm-midnight. Yes, we were crazy. Yes, we were also mostly irresponsible college students.)
-Only a single set of officers prevents the problem of not having enough people WILLING to be in office. Two seperate parks means eight people in Sacramento need to be willing to commit to being an officer. Sharing those officers between the two days with a united park, means that there's more people in the officer pool and people don't get stuck doing term after term after term after term because no one else wants to.
-When it comes to tournaments and CQs, you can set a time that's NOT during one of the two field days if it's more convenient for people to attend. Sometimes, we hosted our CQs on either Saturday (since we fielded Thursday and Sunday) if it was better for people, or we hosted them Sunday evening if people had to work during normal field time. Same with our Althings; they were typically held AFTER field to make it easier for more people to attend. They were usually also at someone's house, since it gets cold in the northeast, so it meant we all hung out and sometimes made dinner for everyone and had some shared hang out/bonding time as a group.
-People are more encouraged to show up to both days. There's no 'our field vs their field' mentality; they're both your fields, your park; people get excited about larger attendance days and going out and having fun. Everyone is in on making the park great together.
-The official primary field day can be set between the two, but attendance can waffle back and forth. Sometimes, our Thursday night fields would regularly draw 40-50 people, but our Sundays would only have 10-15; at other times it was reversed, and Sundays would have the higher numbers with Thursday nights only being enough for a quick ditch among the three or four people who braved the cold.
-With the extra number of fields, most terms the officers got together and picked a day from each month to run as the Officer's Day. The four officers were in charge of battlegames and/or quests, etc for the day, and if anything extra needed to happen such as awards, they were all definitely in attendance that day so that could happen. People knew ahead of time what the scheduled days were and that they would be a special day, so they could plan in advance to be there.
A few years ago, Caradoc Hold had a group of people split off, with a second full park forming in a suburb of the city it plays in. This park is located 21 miles from Caraodoc's primary field location and 26 miles from its secondary field, with over a half an hour drive between either field. It allowed some players who were located even further out from the city and from Caradoc's fields to play, and fields on a THIRD day of the week, allowing more flexibility. It's far enough that besides feasts, events, and special days, people don't regularly hit up both parks, but it happens some. They're a shire; Caradoc is a duchy.
To help make this all feasible, tho, Goldenvale has no attendance cap on players. With a park about an hour and a half drive away that fielded on Wednesday nights with a battlegame heavy night (another college campus with a primarily student-based populace) we had a few people who would hit all four fields in a week. With V7 in full swing, if someone REALLY wanted to, they could level a class in a couple weeks by making the rounds multiple times (tho their wallet would be hurting from all the gas.)
If the people of TR and MV don't want to merge, that's completely fine; I don't really have an opinion on whether or not they should, but coming from an area with BOTH a park that has two field days, and has two parks that both function, I've seen how things can work out with either situation. Or, you know, sometimes both at once.