Thanks for bringing this situation to our attention. The BJCP handles all competition registrations, so I checked in with David Houseman, the Competition Director for the BJCP. David indicated he had received a complaint about the competition and had checked in with the competition director. Here’s David’s response:
“They had about 40+ entries but only got one BJCP judge to sign up so they cancelled the formal competition but agreed to refund the entry fees and to go ahead and judge the entries and provide feedback to the entrants.”
From David’s response, it sounds like they are going to go ahead with the judging, but didn’t want to take the entrant’s money given that they did not have as many BJCP judges as they had intended.
Neither the AHA nor BJCP have direct control over any competition. The purpose of the Sanctioned Competition Program is to provide a framework for running competitions, including forms, procedures and awarding points for judges. If a competition fails to meet the few requirements of running a sanctioned competition, we can decline to sanction the competition in the future. There is nothing in the sanctioning guidelines dealing with cancelation of competitions and no minimum requirement for BJCP ranked judge participation, so no specific rule that has been violated in this case. As such, there is not much we can do other than refuse future sanctioning if this becomes a pattern for this particular competition.
Cheers!
Gary
Gary Glass
Director
