I just got off the phone with Steve Bierle of Northern Prairie Game Calls. He helped set up the calling contest in Brookings, SD this past year. I got a lot of good info on laying the groundwork for getting a contest set up.
Basically there's two types of contests, sanctioned and unsanctioned. To get a sanctioned one you have to go through the Stuttgart Chamber of Commerce. Right now there's a waiting list to get a regional competition. So there'd be no way ND would get one, especially with the big regional at the Game Fair in MN. Although you can get a state sanctioned contest. Since ND doesn't have one that sounds like it'd be fairly easy to get. With a state sanctioned one only residents can compete and the winner would go on to Nationals.
You can also set up an unsanctioned one without going through Stuttgart, and it would be open to anyone. Basically the size of the purse would dictate how many people you'd get to come. Advertising would be easy because all you have to do is post some announcements on some of the bigger waterfowl sites and you'd have all the interest you could want. A purse of few hundred dollars would probably only bring people in from surrounding states, but if you could get a purse over a $1,000 you'd start to pull in more people and maybe even some big names. The main thing is finding sponsors to put up the cash and prizes. Since there aren't any contests in ND I don't think that would be too tough, for a small contest at least. I'm sure you could get some of the sporting goods stores in the area to contribute some stuff.
The hard part would be to find judges. Since there aren't many, if any, contest callers in ND there's no pool to get judges from. Sanctioned contests require 5 judges. In an unsanctioned you can go as low as you want but you want to have at least 3 to keep it impartial. The MN Duck & Goose Caller Association has judges and that's not too far away so if we had a contest we could hopefully get some judges from there to come.
All in all, there's still a lot of details to iron out and we'd probably be looking at next summer if we were really serious to get a contest lined up. Steve said to not expect much your first year. If you can get a dozen callers that's a good start (for a state sanctioned contest). Then things will hopefully snowball as interest grows. I think we could probably get a dozen guys easily. Plus I think if we held an unsanctioned one with decent enough prizes we could bring in a lot more callers than that. The Brookings contest had a duck calling contest, goose calling contest and a "King Of The Cornfield" two man team goose calling contest. I think it'd be pretty cool to get something like that set up.
What do you guys think about this? Do you think there's enough interest where we could realistically start a contest somewhere in state?
