Ninety days out: decide the shape of the event
Everything downstream depends on four decisions. Which divisions you will offer (by age, grade or level), how many teams each can hold, the format (pool play into a bracket, straight bracket, round robin), and what a team gets for its entry fee (guaranteed games, awards, a gate-free weekend for families). Write these down before you open registration; changing them after teams have paid is how you lose goodwill.
Lock the venue at the same time. Count courts or fields you can actually use, the hours you hold them, and how long a game runs including warm-up and changeover. That count, not your ambition, sets your team cap. A weekend that promises three games per team on six courts with forty teams is a schedule that does not exist.
- Divisions, caps and format on paper
- Venue hours and playable courts or fields confirmed in writing
- Guaranteed games per team decided
- Entry fee, gate policy and refund policy decided
- Insurance and any sanctioning sorted (see the questions at the end)
Sixty days out: open registration by division
Registration should do the work you would otherwise do by hand: put each team into the right division, collect the roster and the waivers, and take the money. Registration by division with its own price and cap means you never oversell a bracket, and a roster collected at sign-up means you are not chasing coaches for names on Friday night.
Take payment at registration, online, to your own account. Deposits with a balance due later feel kinder and create a second collections job; most operators who run more than one event a year move to pay-in-full with a clear refund policy. If you use payment plans, make the final payment date well before the schedule is published.
Waivers belong inside registration, signed by the parent for each athlete, not emailed as PDFs afterwards. On Saturday morning you want one screen that says every player on this roster is cleared.
- One sign-up per team: division, roster, waivers, payment
- Caps enforced by the system, not by you
- Payment lands in your own account
- Refund and weather policy visible before they pay
Three weeks out: build the schedule
This is the part that used to cost a weekend of spreadsheets. The inputs are courts or fields and the hours you hold them, teams by division, game length including changeover, minimum rest between a team's games, pool sizes and how pools feed the bracket, and any team constraints (a coach with two teams, a team arriving late Friday). The output is a schedule where no team plays back-to-back, no court sits dark, and every pool finishes in time for the bracket to start.
Do it by hand and it takes days and breaks the moment one team drops. Do it with a scheduler that treats courts and rest as constraints and it takes minutes, and re-solves in seconds when something changes on Saturday. Either way, publish the schedule early enough that families can book travel, and tell them it may move.
Publish once, in one place families already look: your event site and app. Emailed PDFs go stale the first time a court goes down.
- Courts, hours, game length and rest rules written down
- Pools and bracket format decided per division
- Schedule published to the site and app, with a change notice
- A plan for the first thing that goes wrong (a court lost, a team dropped)
One week out: the gate, the staff and the message
Decide how money comes in at the door before you decide who stands there. Online tickets and parking passes bought before the family leaves the house mean shorter lines, less cash on site and a gate total you can see live. If you must take cash, keep it to one lane and count it twice.
Staff the weekend by job, not by person: gate, scoring, court monitor, medical, information. Each job needs one written page: where to be, what to do, who to call. Volunteers do a good job when the job is small and clear.
Send one message to every registered family the week before, and one the day before: parking, gate, schedule link, weather policy, who to contact. Send it from the roster so nobody is missed, and send it in the ways they read (text and push for changes, email for detail).
- Tickets and parking on sale online
- Gate staffed, scanning on phones, cash lane minimized
- One page per job for every volunteer
- Week-before and day-before message sent to every family
Game day: scores in once, at the court
The most-watched thing you own on Saturday is the standings page. Keep it honest by having the score entered once, at the court, by the person who saw the game, from a phone. Standings, tiebreakers, seeding and the bracket should move on their own from that one entry; if someone is carrying a clipboard to a laptop between games, your bracket will be late and your families will be refreshing a stale page.
Something will change. A court goes down, a team forfeits, a game runs long. The job is not to prevent it; it is to re-solve fast and tell every affected family in one send. Operators who run a lot of these keep one person whose only job on Saturday is watching the schedule and the phone.
- Scorers know exactly how to enter a result
- Standings and bracket live on the site and app
- One person owns changes and communication
- Medical and incident procedure posted at every court
Sunday night: payout, awards and the debrief
Awards go out at the court, not by mail. Payout should already be in motion: if entry fees and the gate ran through your own account, the money is yours on a rolling schedule and there is nothing to reconcile by hand.
Do a twenty-minute debrief while it is fresh: what broke, what families asked, what the volunteers needed that they did not have. Write it into next year's checklist. The operators whose events grow are the ones whose second year is visibly smoother than the first.
- Awards presented on site
- Entry and gate revenue reconciled without spreadsheets
- Debrief written into next year's plan
- Thank-you message to families and volunteers, with next year's date if you have it