Tournament Schedule

[Shad_Master]

How do you guys, especially the smaller clubs, set your schedule for the year?  We have a local club that has two tournament series.  The club tournaments are all fished on a set schedule voted on by the membership, but I am more interested in ideas for the other series.  We call this the Calcutta and it is more informal and another way for club members to get out and fish.

The idea started out to fish a lake close by the tournament lake on the day before or the day after the club tournament.  This didn't work too well as there was not a lot of participation.  The the format changed to fishing on non-tournament weekends at lakes "close to home" (usually not more than a 1-2 hour drive).  Eventually this came down to fishing a series of tournaments on one lake -- problem was a lot of guys were pre-fishing and the playing field got skewed.  So then we went to a "draw" selection for lakes -- named four lakes and drew on the night before the tournament and everybody showed up at that lake and fished.  Last two years, we had a fixed schedule but had to include some lakes that are not very good producers in order to fill up the season.  Last year we branched out but this required driving up to 2-2.5 hours for a short day of fishing.

Now we are considering:

-- set a pre-selected schedule

-- going back to the draw

-- selecting up to three lakes and rotate (fish each lake three times in succession)

We also talked about voting on where to fish at each months meeting, but there is some concern that this will lead to a lot of arguing.

Just wonder how you guys do it.  Thanks for any input you can give me.