Alright..
First, an X Ball game the same day as regular Millenium that you're also playing in is a horrid idea. X Ball games are EXHAUSTING, and that's with a full 10-player roster, 3 coaches and a pit crew. With 7-8 players, your players are not going to stop moving for the 90 minutes they're on the field, and it's going to be even worse than IAO and World Cup if you follow the NXL's lead and drop to 2 minute timeouts.
Second, I'm with TJ: What are you guys paying for? If there's some significant fees to play X Ball at night after millenium games, I can only believe that one of two things are true: 1) Someone doesn't know what they're doing or 2) Someone is pocketing a lot of cash.
Set up your 7-man field, add a penalty box on each end and an extra 100 yards or so of netting on one side to enclose team staging areas. Run 7-man on this field all day, and then (with some intelligent field design) take down the row of bunkers in front of the team staging area. Now you've got your coaching area and a 5-man X Ball field.
You're not paying refs apparently if the teams are reffing themselves (Which just means the whole Millenium + reffing + playing is even MORE tiring), you're not paying any more for facilities, and the setup/takedown cost differences are minimal. What are you paying for?
Paint: College teams averaged under 15 cases a match. That's on par with what our All-Star team shoots in 10-man. They did play 2 or 3 matches, so yes, if you're playing 2-3 matches, you're using more paint than you would if you just played one 10-man (or 7-man) event.
IAO teams shot 25 cases per match. They also shoot 25+ cases per 10-man tournament - point being that yes, they shoot more than college X Ballers, but they shoot more than college players in general. Again, those teams did play 2-4 matches, so yes, they shot more than they would have in a 10-man (two to four times as much) but they also PLAYED a lot more too. So if you play one X Ball match, you're not going to shoot more paint than one 7-man tournament.
Practice: How hard is it to get a stopwatch and a 5-man field to practice? If you're practicing, you're practicing. I have pictures of Purdue practicing, that's exactly what they did: 5-man field, played X Ball format. Illinois and Illinois State did the same thing against each other.
The most expensive thing about X Ball is the scoreboard. You can have one made for about $15,000 + maybe $5k in controls - if you do the big scoreboard thing. You can fake it with multiple TV outputs, a laptop and a TVout video card for under $5k.
I think you guys have got to take step back and seriously ask yourselves TJ's questions. It seems like you've decided that you need to play X Ball, but have forgotten WHY you need to play X Ball. I don't think it's a good idea to do it very wrong just for the sake of doing it.
- Chris
