IPMS EH Miller, Evansville, IN, 14 April 2007
It has been three years since this group has held an invitational. In the passing time, they have been trying to get one going and this year, they did. Unfortunately, the forgot to tell the rest of the modeling community about it. The only way I found out about this is that I'm on their e-mail listing for club information, though they did manage to get it listed in the IPMS/USA website.
First off, no flyers were sent out to previous contestants. Secondly, the WWW site listed in IPMS/USA's site does not exist. A last minute e-mail to find out exactly where it is being held (as I'd vaguely remembered it from a past e-mail, but could no longer download the attachment), did not arrive in time, though one was waiting me when I got back home from the event.
The result is that we spent considerable time wandering about looking for it. We found out after arriving that there was a sign pointing to the site, but it only showed the name of the site and nothing about it being a model show! If you didn't know where they were holding it (which our group didn't), then the sign was of no use. Anyway, after about an hour of hunting, we did find the site and it is a good one for this group. It was held in a 4H fairgrounds building and had plenty of room for the vendors (all seven of them) and the contest tables. Due to the paucity of vendors, I came home with most of the money I took with me, though I did find a couple of good deals.
Entry fee was $10 for the first model and a buck for each additional up to a total spending of $14 and after that, additional were no charge. Not a bad way to do things as the club gives out nice awards for all places. Evansville has one of the best ways of doing entries of any club around. You are given a master sheet on which your entry number is provided (say, #8). This has all your personal info. Then you are given a slip for each entry. So you write down all the pertinent info on the master form, and just transfer entry number (such as 8-1, 8-2 and so on) and name of the entry to the slip that accompanies the model. The various categories are listed on the main sheet back so we could pick what was appropriate. Has we gotten a flyer, we'd have had more of an idea of what was available prior to hitting the road.
Back to the facilities. There were no refreshments of any kind, I didn't even see a water cooler. The closest place for that was to hop in the car and drive back down the road to a grocery store. There were some additional chairs, but at times all were in use. Lighting was fair but not optimal. However, it really makes little difference and that is because of the judging. You see, IPMS EH Miller does no judging. That is up to the various entrants to perform this odious task. The result is that people and their friends vote for each other's entry or what they like. It is by far the lamest judging method on the planet. However, those of us who attend know this and bring accordingly. I also feel it is why we rarely see many people from other clubs and as such it holds back the club from doing better. This also keeps vendors away as these folks want large audiences to sell their goodies. In my opinion, EH Miller really needs to take a good look at how they run their show if they want greater participation. I should also mention that they do allow sweeps and will provide duplicate awards in case of a tie (which happened a couple of times).
Moving on to the raffle, this was two tickets for a buck and they had a goodly number of nice prizes for this. I found that the young lady in charge of the raffle needed to do more than shake the can up and down a few times and should have really mixed things up as it was somewhat disheartening to see a list of ticket numbers nearly in sequence being drawn.
With but 126 entries from around 35-40 modelers, the tallying of votes was relatively short and by 3 PM, the awards ceremony was well under way. We were on the road at 3:30.
Now, before people think I'm dumping on the EH Miller gang, let me say that I do enjoy every event I've attended after the first one where I realized how they ran things. The club members are friendly and helpful and just plain fun to be around. They realize there were some things that went wrong and after a 2 year hiatus, mistakes are bound to happen.
What I think they need to work on is:
As someone who likes to go to contests to chat with entrants and see what others build as my primary motivation, I know I'll be going to every event they hold. Besides, they are only 120 miles or so away, one of the shortest drives of the contest year. If you think you can handle their non-judging and want to meet some nice people as well. I'd encourage you to attend the next one.