Our process for determining how to handle this situation from a sanctioning point of view seemed to make it out there through people sharing some of that private correspondence that I had, but I figured it was best to have this posted here for clarity.
The ultimate decision was that this was IFPA’s fault and not the TD’s fault for following our rules and guidelines for sanctioning.
We were fortunate to have an IFPA Director on site (the chances of that being the case out of the 13,000 events we sanction each year is extremely slim), so this allowed our internal Slack channel to engage in a debate on the issue with actual direct content from one of our staff on site. We jumped on the situation as quickly as we could.
The correspondence from that discussion can be found here:
https://www.ifpapinball.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/OBX.jpg
That conversation gave me the confidence that we had made the best of this horrific situation, with a solution that was signed off by the IFPA Director on site, the rest of the IFPA team in our Slack channel, along with confirmation from the IFPA North Carolina State Representative who was in attendance at the event and the registered IFPA Tournament Director who was in attendance at the event.
There was no additional commentary regarding the event from that group above for the rest of the weekend and those IFPA representatives remained on site participating and helping to organize the rest of the weekend festivities at the location.
This evidence presented me with the feedback that while pulling sanctioning was definitely up for immediate consideration based on the issues at hand, that the IFPA as an organization decided at that moment to take ownership of approving the sanctioning of the events based on those guidelines that were presented and accepted about moving forward.
This puts the organization in a situation where:
1) TD asks for guidance from IFPA
2) IFPA provides necessary guidance
3) TD confirms guidance will be followed
4) IFPA confirms that the sanctioning of the event can continue . . . only to revoke that sanctioning decision after that fact.
In hindsight the correct decision was for me to simply pull sanctioning from the event IMMEDIATELY when the issue was brought to our attention in the Slack channel. While giving my full authority to the IFPA Director on site to do whatever was necessary, I take full responsibility for putting that IFPA Director in that situation, even with the full arsenal of IFPA power behind her in those moments.
Ultimately removing WPPR’s because WE (IFPA) messed up didn’t feel right to do to the TD and the players that followed our guidelines for sanctioning. That wasn’t a precedent we wanted to set that any explicit approvals by us could be overturned at any time in the future based on failures of the IFPA organization and not the TD/players in attendance. For these reasons the sanctioning of all three OBX events will stand.
Just for proper context – the pulling of sanctioning after the fact is if the TD did something that went against our guidelines AFTER the moment we confirmed with them that sanctioning the event would be fine based on the confirmation from our team on how it was being handled.
