Comments From First Vice President & Regional Director

At the NHPA convention meeting this year Knoxville, TN was awarded the 2012 World Tournament. This is great news for the Florida players since it is only a 1 day drive to get there. All of the horseshoe courts will be in the same Convention Center building with A/C, including the practice courts. The rule change to allow Elder Men to purchase a card to pitch at a distance less than 40 feet, when the new cards come out in October was voted on and made permanent by the convention delegates.

Florida was well represented at the World Tournament in Cedar Rapids, Iowa this year with a few 1^st place finishes and several top 6 finishes. Congratulations to all of you. It was great to visit with horseshoe pitching friends to pitch, watch, and talk horseshoes for a week. I hope Florida will have several more attendees the next two years when the World Tournament is held in Monroe, LA and Knoxville, TN. I thought the clay at the W. T. this year was ok but not as good as last year. It became very tacky if over watered. The setup in the main hockey arena was great with really good spectator seating and plenty of A/C. The other adjoining pitching arena was comfortable but did not have A/C, and had minimal spectator seating on one side only. You can check out all of the W. T. class results and the W. T. Championship Divisions game by game results on the NHPA website under World Tournament Coverage.

This was the 1^st year the HSMaster program was used to run the World Tournament and it worked very well. Thanks to Lois Chipperfield from the Bradenton club for volunteering to do the data entry 3 days for the 7:00 a.m. shift. She was able to do all the data entry by herself for 48 courts during that shift. Please remember to download the latest version of the HSMaster program from the NHPA website to keep up with the latest enhancements to the program. It can be used to run your league play and sanctioned tournaments. You should always backup your copy of the hsmaster.mdb file to some external storage like a flash drive or CD before installing a new version. I would also recommend that you keep a backup copy of your current HSMaster installable file. This way you can always re-install the previous version if the new version fails.

The Horseshoe Pitching Newsline is a great newsletter published every 2 months by the NHPA with all kinds of important information about horseshoe pitching around the country. Subscription dues are only $12 per year or $30 for 3 years. Support the NHPA by renewing your subscription now. You can find a subscription form on the NHPA website under Publicity/Promotion.

I am looking forward to the new tournament season. Good Luck and Good Pitching.

Ron Deckard

FSHPA First Vice President

Regional Director