When you’re in charge of running a sports tournament, there are so many things to take care of. You have to plan logistics like where to play games, what date and time to start or end the tournament, and who is allowed to enter. Then, once you’ve settled on answers to those questions, there’s advertising to take care of, referees and score keepers to hire, and equipment to rent. Of course, you’ll also want to setup a system for accepting registration forms and fees, scheduling games and recording stats and scores, and updating players and teams as the event draws near. Luckily, you can do all of that and more using RecLeague.net.
Here’s an easy to follow guide to running a tournament on our website.
1. Login to your RecLeague account, or signup if you don’t have one already.
2. Create a new site for your tournament. Be sure to pick a name that is short, easy to remember, and try to include a year or season. That way, if you want to create another tournament down the road with a similar name, you’ll be able to just create a new site with the same name, but change the year or season. You’ll have the added benefit on keeping the information from the previous tournament. For example, say you are running a charity tourney for a local orphanage. A good short name might be RockCityorphanage17 since it’s clear and descriptive, and lets you create RockCityorphanage18 for your next tournament.
3. Open team or player registration and accept payment online. It’s easy to setup a questionnaire / registration form on RecLeague.net. Just go to your site dashboard and click Registration Forms, then add new. You’ll be directed to name the registration form, then asked to create some questions for players or teams to answer. The best part is that you’ll be able to accept and track registration fees through our website just by filling out a small form. We’ll also keep track of your waiting list, and help you to organize and edit registrations as they come in.
4. Advertise your websites URL. Since you created a short name in step 2, it’s easy to share your custom link to your website. Posting it on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. with a picture of your tournaments flyer, a picture of the grand prize, or an action shot from a previous tournament is a great way to hype potential players up and increase your registrations.
5. Once you’ve gotten enough registrations and received payment from enough teams, you can proceed to create those teams on your RecLeague site. If you’re running a single or double elimination bracket, check out our Tournament Brackets so that you can get a live updating view of each teams progression through the tournament. If you’re running a round robin tournament, check out our Round Robin scheduler that ensures that every team in the tournament plays each other team once.
6. You’re now ready to start the tournament. Be sure to have your scorers track the stats and games using our mobile apps so that you can provide live scores and stats updates, as well as a detailed game history through our game log feature.
Good luck!