Greetings! This blog is for the teachers and studio directors. We have a HUGE favor to ask of you for the coming competition season. Please do your best to get us your entries on or before deadline. In the last year delayed entries caused all kinds of trouble for all involved: teachers, parents, kids, and us. I know it is hard to teach all week, be moms and wives, do the paperwork that is needed, and then get everything to us by deadline. But (there always seems to be a “but” doesn’t there), life just gets so much more difficult for all of us if you don’t. Delegate if you need to. Find a parent who can do the paperwork or type in the online entries for you. If something does happen and you miss deadline please, please, please send us an email and let us know exactly what’s coming and when we should receive it, (this is not a way out by the way, just a suggestion for desperate times, and no guarantees are implied as to the acceptance of those entries). What we need most of all by deadline is an accurate count of your acts and any other details you can give us, keeping in mind that we make very important decisions based on the information you provide (or don’t provide). Let me illustrate with a couple of actual events from the past… mid-season last year, entries are rolling in for a number of cities, phones are ringing, faxes are going off, entries are coming by snail mail, from the men in brown and over the computer. In the midst of all this a studio (which will remain nameless) calls to ask some questions about various issues. With their questions answered, they end the call with “We’ll see you in Big City”, (name changed, obviously). To the many different people who answer the office phones this is a common friendly salutation from one of the thousands of studios we talk to each year. Fast forward ahead a couple of weeks… deadline for “Big City” comes and goes, we set the detailed schedule and close the competition due to size (something that is becoming more and more common). The schedule goes out to all of the 45 plus participating studios on the Tuesday a week and a half before the competition and one week after deadline (trust me we really cut it to the wire for you on deadline as it is). The following Friday a packet of entries arrives for the show in “Big City” with 10+ acts trying to get in. I make the phone call: "I am sorry, the show closed last week, the schedule went out Tuesday, we are full, acts start at 8 am and conclude at 10 pm, we cannot add 10+ more acts to an already set schedule.” The teacher replies, "No problem, I was late getting it together, we will do another city instead. But hey (there’s that “but” again), by the way, my friend sent in her stuff this week too and has 35 more acts." WHAT! Twenty minutes later frantic friend (the one who issued the friendly salutation three weeks ago) calls to say, "My stuff is in the mail, you must take us, we made plans to come, all of my kids are planning on it, you can't do this to us, you should have known we were coming. I called, I told you we would see you in Big City.” Again I apologized and explained we were full, the schedule was already set with the other 45 studios that we actually had entries from and that we could not in all fairness adjust the schedule by as much as an hour a day (which we didn’t have anyway). Studio teacher responds, "That's ok, we’ll dance after 10 pm.” Again I explain that that’s not fair to the other studios involved. My point from this story is this: If we don’t have your entries in writing, we don’t have your entries at all. Casual phone calls just don’t cut it. Flash-forward again to the end of our story… We ultimately took more than 20 phone calls from angry parents, even more calls from the studio director, and even from the friend who was now angry as well. We were called many ugly names including “greedy”, because we let our shows get too big, (I’m still trying to figure the logic on that one since they were mad because we wouldn’t make it bigger). In the end, we had to turn them away. Good common sense dictates you don’t put kids on the stage to dance much after 10:00 pm no matter how much money you might make in the process. I guess I’m not very professional in telling this story. I am human however and it feels good to get my point across. I am truly sorry that we couldn’t take those acts, not because of the money, but for the kids. They’ll probably be dancing with another competition in the coming year; I just hope it’s not after 10 pm. I promised 2 stories to illustrate my plea that you meet deadline. This next story of missed deadlines (very short and too the point) created a very different issue… Just a few weeks ago we made the very painful decision to cancel one of our Dance Directive master class programs due to a lack of entries. We had even waited a few days past deadline just in case. Lo and behold two days later the mailbox was full of entries and we could have had a very nice event if we had only known what was coming for sure. In this case everybody loses. This has actually happened to us two other times I can think of in the last 11 years. Again I emphasize, if we don’t have your entries in hand by deadline it could very well affect the outcome of some very important decisions we must make. Please do everything in your power to get entries to us on time. Or, at the very least, keep us well informed on your intentions (no wild guesses allowed). Everyone will be better off as a result. KIM