That is, to put it lightly, hard to understand. AFAIK Atlanta ran just fine last year. There is a good concentration of judges there. On paper (and now in practice) much better than many of the sites that were used.
Is the point just to move them around and let everyone get a chance (sorta like how people can't just lose in this competition they have to get a participation certificate)?
It is hard to understand. The only facts that I am certain about is that Atlanta was willing and expecting to host it again after 2 years of successful judging. My best guess at the other side of events was that Nashville had been asking in the past and in order to keep things fair they moved it there. (The South location has moved around in the past: FL, NC, GA, and now TN).
I think that is fine. I know a lot of great guys that are judges in TN and they put on some great local club-sponsored comps. But, it is just tough to have one location like that and you basically wall it off to judges participating. There are a lot of judges in NC, GA, and FL that probably did not make the drive for the reasons I said before.
750 entries will push the limits of almost any city to get judges out and seat 2 quality judges per entry. A lot of locations result in using novice, non-BJCP judges, which is not necessarily bad, but sometimes I think these novices are doing the organizers a favor more than wanting to learn to judge.
First year I sent in entries to the Nationals the scoresheets were crap. The novice judges mimic the crap that the "higher ranking" judges put down. At that point I decided that I wanted to start judging so that I could criticize. Judging is not easy, but properly filling out a scoresheet should be, if it is not easy, then stop judging.
Personally, at least in the south, it would make sense to split the judging sites to 2 or 3. To prevent it from becoming highly regional or a repeat of a club sponsored comp, you could split the location by categories. For example, Nashville could take cats 1-7, Atlanta 8-15, and Asheville 16-23 (or whatever, that is an example). You could even use one shipping location and have someone drive them (AHA could reimburse the gas or whatever). This way you have more quality judges and less work for those judges to do.
Or you could just have 2 locations with 400 entries each. The problem is not with cities willing to host, the problem is that
750 entries is too much.
Asking a judge to spend nearly $300 to go judge the regionals for 2 maybe 2.5 judging points is a lot.
(This should not be taken as a criticism of Nashville. It sounds like they did a good job. I am merely using it as an example as to how the system is set up to exclude a lot of judge and not guarantee success.)
