I completely agree with brian and o-malley, granted anything I say really has no bearing here or on the subject, but I was vice-pres of our rugby club in college 2 years ago, we held an annual tournament at our school. It was always hard to fill the brackets, 13 or 14 just isn’t a great # for a 2-day tourney, so we invited two semi-pro teams to come play a 15’s match on saturday, then a 7’s match on sunday (they are basically 2 completely different teams for each version of the game, but under the same organization). It was a huuuuge success, we filled 32 teams, had the exclusive matches on the main field while we took a break between rounds to get everything sorted out. We usually pulled in around 4 or 5k for the tourney annually. We killed with 11.5k – solely because of the teams we brought in, it was a very high level rugby match which is very fun to watch for people who basically just got in the sport and are aspiring to be great. We sold more shirts/concessions/entry fees – there is not one thing that hurt us from it. We had a great after party, where many of the players from the two teams came and talked to us about strategy and everything and anything we liked to ask. They loved it because they got to share some knowledge built up over years. We loved it because we gained that knowledge and got to see a great game… just my .02…
