Pictona Members
Here is your invitation to play in the Humana-Island Doctors Bainbridge Cup Tournament that will be held at Pictona April 7-11. You can learn more about the tournament, the exciting format that will be followed, and the pomp and ceremony that goes with the largest international pickleball tournament in the world at https://pictona.org/bc21/. From this location you will be able to link to Pickleball Tournaments.com to learn even more. But don’t try to register yet.
BC21 will have 5 skill levels (3.0, 3.5, 4.0, 4.5, and 5.0) and 8 age groups (19+, 35+, 50+, 55+, 60+ 65+, 70+, and 75+) for men’s doubles, women’s doubles, and mixed doubles. Singles will be a demonstration event and is not part of the registration process described below. For this international event the competition will be between the EAST and the WEST. The East is east of the Mississippi along with Europe and the West is west of the river along with Asia.
Pictona members will have two opportunities to register for the tournament. The first is a special arrangement with the International Federation of Pickleball (IFP) to permit 100 of our members to register for the tournament before the general registration and to receive a $10 discount off the $125 registration fee. The second opportunity is to register during the general registration period.
We hope you will want to play in BC21. If we have more than 100 players apply for early registration, we will have to select the players for early guaranteed entry. To do so we are limited by the IFP in the number of players we can assign to any one age/skill bracket. There are 40 brackets. We need to do so separately for men’s doubles, women’s doubles, and mixed doubles, providing equal places for men and women. Partners may or may not be members of Pictona which influences the number of Pictona registrants selected. And the IFP requires us to divide equally our 100 registrants into East and West teams. You may specify a preference on your registration form, and we’ll do our best to assign you to that team.
As you can see the registration distribution is complex. We will be able to select members for one or more of the available places in each bracket only after we know who has applied to enter the tournament. The distribution of entries will not be equal across the 40 brackets for each of the 3 events (Men, Women, Mixed). We will have a quota of the number of teams in each bracket, with the more popular brackets accepting more entries up to the limits set by the IFP. If we have more players registered in a bracket than we can accept, we will randomly select the players from the pool of registrants in that bracket. We will not select registrants on the basis of any other criteria. Remember, however, if you are not accepted into the 100 pre-registrants, you have a second opportunity to register during the general registration just as you would do for any other tournament. Also know that there will be waiting lists created when registrations exceed the initial limits per bracket set by the IFP, and then when registrations are complete and certain brackets are not filled to their limit, people on waiting lists will be invited to play. You may enter without having a partner, but if you do not have a partner before registration ends on February 14th, you will be dropped from the tournament.
One additional item: Both you and your partner must be members of USA Pickleball to play in the tournament. Annual membership is $20 and you may join at https://usapickleball.org.
Don’t let all of this complexity scare you away. We encourage all members of Pictona to pre-register for the 100 places available to us. Here is what to do.
We look forward to your participation in this international event.