by Rob | May 3rd, 2008
As spring approaches, more and more people might be seen throwing pointy sticks and overweight frisbees, jumping into pits of sand, and running as hard as they can only to find that they’ve come full circle right back to where they started. In the abstract, track and field sounds silly, but it’s a favorite sport of many since it offers so many different events within the same arena.
At the high school and college levels competitors not only perform individually in their own events, they often are also part of a larger team and earn the team points by performing well in their respective events. This dynamic makes the overall event exciting for both the athletes and the spectators. It is also this two-tier hierarchy that makes organizing and scoring track and field events complex. Each event requires its own specialist team of organizers and scorers, and the entire meet needs to be managed and synchronized as a whole. Event scores need to be efficiently processed and handled real-time in an effort to keep the team scores updated frequently.
This situation is true for any competition that may have several levels of scoring, and it often applies to everyday league competition. Many organized team leagues are scored by the individual match, by the group of several matches that may be played on a given league night, and then at the overall season level. Managers of leagues such as darts and billiards typically employ these principles when tracking scores and players. Efficient organization is key, and in this regard, it is imperative to choose the right tool for tournament coordination so that competitors, coaches, and spectators are all up to date on the happenings of the meet.
by Zach | February 3rd, 2008
Picking your tournament type is a delicate decision. You have to balance three key issues to maximize competitor enjoyment: competition level, number of matches played, and administrative resources (duration of tournament, officiating staff, courts and fields).
And never before has their been a worse tournament type at balancing these issues than Single Elimination. One loss and you’re out, el fin. There are no second chances. Even the best and highest seeded team in a tournament can have a bad match. But your job as a tournament director is to guarantee that the best team is the team that wins first place.
Is a single loss a significant enough factor to state without variability or doubt that a losing team is not indeed the best team? As Tournologists, we would say no. But we’re not here to make that decision for you. We’re here to provide you with the tools to make that decision for yourself.
Quick Reference:
- Length: One of the shortest tournament types, will eliminate teams quickly and leave them hungry for more matches. This tournament type has fewer teams playing with every round that goes by. Works best as a second-phase to a qualification round, usually a Round Robin.
- Size: Works best with a number of competitors that is a power of two, so that you don’t have a lot of byes (a match in which one team has no opponent and wins automatically). So tournament sizes of 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256 teams, et cetera. The closer to the power of two without going over will minimize the amount of byes. So, a tournament with 15 teams will have much fewer byes than a tournament with 17 teams. For that reason, many tournament directors find it easier to truncate down a tournament when they’ve gone over a power of two, rather than attempt to add teams to reach the next power of two.
- Examples: National Football League post-season. NCAA College Basketball March Madness.
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