Entries, entries everywhere

I'm up to my knees at the moment in sorting the entries out for the Golf Croquet World Championship and the Under 21 GCWC.  Both take place this July in England - the GCWC at Hurlingham and Surbiton (see http://www.gcworlds2011.org/ if you want more details and tickets to spectate) and the Under 21s at Hunstanton.

I hadn't been through the entries process before, and there's a lot more to it than imagined.  Things happen in 4 top-level stages:

1. the WCF works out how many places should be allocated to each Member association, based on their share of players in the World Top 100 (all Full and Associate Members get at least one place).  A small number of "wild card" places are reserved too.
2. the Members then send in their entries for their allocated places, which are accepted automatically - and any nominations they wish to make for a wild card place
3. the WCF then considers the wild card nominations and tries to share them out fairly, following half a dozen different criteria described in the Sports Regs
4. then I chase to get email addresses, biographies, photos and entry fees for each player.

Step 3 turned out to be both more difficult and more contentious than I'd appreciated.  For the GCWC, there were 38 nominations for 8 wild card places.  There were 5 very strong candidates - and then came a large gaggle of players all with quite similar rankings and playing history.  Trying to separate them was tricky! 

For the Under 21s we had a different problem - and a slightly revised process.  Members nominated players but for many of them (perhaps half?), they had no World Ranking.  This meant there was little information about their playing history or experience available already.  We asked Members to provide some details - and got widely varying levels of detail.  So this makes it quite tricky to make decisions.  The pressure was a little less, as there were 28 nominations for 24 places.

Now all that remains is to get in the photos, bios and entry fees!  What could possibly go wrong?