Tips on How to Run a Tournament

[Drifter]

I recall seeing somewhere a nice article about, "How to run a tournament" with things like getting a venue, managing your resources, you know typical tournament/project managment type stuff; but I can not for the life of me remember where I saw it.

A situation has arisen in one of the clubs in my division where the people who have been relied upon for years to setup and run tournaments had moved on, so new unexperienced people have taken thier place.

Being down at a tournament at that club this weekend, I discovered the situation to be worse than I had thought, so I agreed to write up a little something to help the new people get things under control again. Simply put though, I am slothful and lazy and would much rather hand them a copy of said article than write up something myself.

So, would anyone like to be an enabler in my sloth and laziness?

Please?

Pretty Please??

[edew]

I posted a thread together with a PDF file on how to run tournaments. Don't know where that thread has gone (probably somewhere around page 18 or so in this forum).

Here's another copy of the pdf file:
http://www.thebaycup.org/DOCS/tourna...ganization.pdf

Hope that helps.

[edew]

And one other thing:

Some people who read that document criticized me for dismissing using the computer in running tournaments. Well, sure enough at the last recent Regional Youth Circuit event in San Francisco (March 19-20), we attempted to use computers to do the tournament organization. It was not a tournament organization software, but a generic excel spreadsheet used to do the sorting and re-ordering of fencers.

Well, for the most part, things went very well. It was faster to enter in the results from the pools and do a sort on V/B. IND, TS than do re-write the results on paper. From there, we immediately posted the seeding from the pools, which everyone appreciated. During that time, we manually filled in the DE table. No problems.

The problem arose during the end of the events when the DE sheets started to come in at a trickle (because most people were out by then). Then, the attention of the BC personnel (including me) were somewhere else (watching the fencers, refereeing, cleaning up whatever) and we neglected to enter the table where a fencer was eliminated.

As most people know, each DE round is called a table. Table A is the first, B is the second, and so on. So, one puts "A" or "B" or whatever next to the person's name to denote where the fencer was eliminated. At the end of the day, you just sort in descending order against that letter. Because the fencers are already pre-sorted based on V/B, IND, TS the additional sorting by elimination table will properly sort the fencers into their final standings. But we neglected to fill in the table. Or we improperly filled in the table. Garbage in, garbage out.

Another item to help speed the process was to "sort" the names in the order as printed in the pools so that in the spread sheet, you'll have a block of names all coming from the same pool. That way, data entry is easier than searching up and down for the person's name in alphabetical order. And, it's easier to see if something is missing or whether there's a pool or two still out: you'll have one or two blocks of names without any V/B IND TS information.

However, I neglected to mention this to one of the assisting fencing moms. She sorted it by alphabetical order and the time it took to enter in the names was twice as long as it would be if the names weren't sorted alphabetically (but by pools as I had originally done). Garbage in, garbage out.

It would be great if people get to play with the software frequently to get used to it. But most people see it maybe once a quarter. They're not going to be familiar with it and if they rely on the computer alone, it's garbage in, garbage out.

[Drifter]

YES! That's the one I was thinking of. Thanks Eric! W00t!

[fluidfencer]

Thanks to one of our club officers and a parent volunteer, we use smaller monthly tournaments to train people on Fencing Time (isn't that the one you can use in conjunction with AskFred?). We now have a bunch of people trained and that aspect of our tournaments has since gone very well. The same principal has been also applied to other tournament functions.

[oso97]

Regarding using a computer, here's my take on the issue. Competent, skilled and expereinced Technical Committee people (those who run the computers and do all the paperwork) are just as important as Referees. If you want a properly run, efficently organized event, it pays to have TC people who are just as professional and dedicated to their task as the referee corps (yes, this means you may also have to pay them like a referee). For the Southwest Section Circuit, we've dedicated considerable resources to training TC people, just like we do for referee training. For any decently sized event, its important that the TC people not be having to do other jobs as well, like refereeing or armoury...

In fact, if you want to know how to run regional events well, taking a look at what we do in the SSCC is probably a good start. It takes a broad group of people working together though to pull it off. But, we had professional TC people at all 5 tournaments who efficently ran things, at least one, and sometimes two or three FOC observers, fully staffed referee cadres, and ended up with efficently run events. I think over the 5 events there were a total of two self-directed pools, and no self-directed DE's. We also added seven new rated referees to our pool of resources, were able to award twelve referee rating increases, and sent five new referees to work at national events.

It helps when you have people who are willing to work together.