Sunday and Monday divisions will be off next week as we observe Memorial Day. Enjoy your long weekend! Memorial Day weekend is the relax weekend before back to back weeks of San Diego APA City Championships. Weekend #1 (May 31- June 1st) is Ladies 8 Ball and the Open 9 Ball. This is a correction from the last week’s newsletter. Ladies will play all of their 8 Ball matches on Sunday, therefore there is no need for the previously mentioned Friday night round. The Ladies will have 9 teams playing for 2 slots to APA Nationals. A quick heads up that Sudden Death for Ladies will be 1 hour and 30 minutes. We will be using the 3 point scoring, so the first team to 5 wins or until one of the teams is mathematically eliminated from winning. Most everything else for the Ladies will be the same as the Open rules. We will hand out rules to all City Championship qualified teams prior to the first round of the tournament.
As most of you know, there have been quite a few issues with our web site over the last several months. APA is working diligently to rectify all of the problems and the hope is that all of the bugs that have occurred during that time will all be fixed soon. To give you a little bit of a history lesson on why these problems occurred in the first place, over the many years that APA has had the equalizer system in place, they originally started with index cards for each player where each scored match was written down and the skill level recalculated by calculator after each match. Score sheets were hand written in those days. Ugh! JEventually, a software developer created a DOS based program that allowed data to be calculated and printed onto score sheets from a dot matrix printer. That’s what we had when we started San Diego APA in 1996. Eventually, the software guy who was an expert in DOS programming attempted to convert his DOS based program to a Windows based program. He succeeded, but it was a bit of a shaky transition because the developer was basically learning as he went along. For what it was meant to do, and after numerous updates, the Windows based program we used actually worked quite well, and it worked well with our old web site. It worked well enough, that we didn’t really want to see it go away when APA decided to move to a Web based program, which is what we are using now. The Web based program was out of the scope of the previous developer’s abilities, and he was ready to retire, so APA hired an outside source to develop the new software. Lots of time was spent by this outside source developing this new software, and at first, it seemed like it was going to be a smooth transition. There were plenty of bugs to deal with, but with each fix, our program and the tied in web sites seemed to become much more stable. As time went on, the relationship with the outside source wasn’t working well with APA’s executive branch as far as communication and timely fixes. Eventually, it became clear that it was time to move to a new software team that APA felt would have the best interests of APA in mind. That team is now in place, but these last few weeks/months where the web site seems to have some of the worst access issues, has been because these guys are basically rewriting the program all over again. Jill and I have met them and they definitely know what they are doing, and the problems that they are having have basically been because they have been trying to develop this new software on the fly, while not creating any downtime for the members to have access to the web site and LO’s to the software for timely administration.
In a nutshell, we are very pleased with the new software and our web site, and we ask for more patience as they continue trying to fix all of the bugs and get everything working perfect. Even when all of the bugs are fixed, it’s likely that there will be occasional downtimes for regular maintenance and upgrades. I’m very impressed with how APA has been able to integrate all that data from one system to another without losing it. To give you an idea, my APA records from when I played in 1988 are still in their system. Records from more than a few million members over the years are all safely stored in this system. A San Diego player recently returned to our league, and in less than a second, I had that player’s 1998 data right in my hands. Better yet, if someone from another part of the country moves to San Diego, I can pull their records in mere seconds. The goal is to eventually make the web site very user-friendly for team and player stats, and eventually to have a fully functional phone app for easy access to rosters, standings, schedules and MVP stats for all of your divisions. We thank everyone for their patience during the transition. We know how frustrating it can be to go to a site and get that “site temporarily not available” warning. We have been dealing with it ourselves.