Industry
Team Pool Concept Growing From its Mosconi Cup Roots to Locations Across The Country
As we noted about a week and a half ago (March 20) in our News pages, the New England Women’s Pool Alliance (NEWPA), which had launched the weekend before, would either have already conducted a second event or be close to doing so before this edition of BILLIARD BUZZ ‘hit the stands,’ so to speak.
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hat $200-added event, The Anchorperson Challenge, scheduled for May 23, will be hosted by Amazin’ Billiards in Malden, MA. Limited to eight teams of four, the competitors will engage, first, in a round robin series of 8-ball matches, and then, advance the best player on each team to a single-elimination tournament. “It’s like a relay team (in a foot race), where the relay team’s best runner, the anchorperson, goes last,” explained Katie Fiorilla, who along with Stacey Tonkin and Samantha Barrett founded the Alliance. It’s a compelling twist to what has become something of a standard format for team pool events, which is modeled on the Mosconi Cup format (a team match, followed by a series of singles and doubles matches), with each competitor earning points to a pre-determined goal. What has become apparent as the NEWPA continues to develop its program of special events, to be accompanied by an asyet-to-be-scheduled series of events and a tour, is that team pool might be the proverbial ‘way to go’ in elevating the sport’s profile in the dizzying array
60 | Billiards Buzz • May 2021
of professional sports available on all manner of media. The merits of the idea are numerous. The potential concerns and obstacles are visible. “I think pool in general has changed over the years,” said Fiorilla. “There aren’t as many pool halls and it’s not as common as it used to be that people would spend a lot of time in pool rooms, gambling. There are just so many other things to do – online poker, video games – that the popularity (of pool) has gone down.”
“It takes a lot of time and practice to get to the point where you can be competitive at pool,” she added, “and a lot of people are just not interested.” Part of the team concept as it applies to individual players is not about pool itself. It’s more about the shared experience of a team and the social interactions among members. “It’s about just getting together for a night out and few drinks,” said Fiorilla. “The team concept is appealing, too, because it’s not just going it alone. The people on the team kind of all Mosconi Cup teams from 2019
