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Tournaments
Tournaments have become a regular feature of many community rugby club’s calendar. Tournaments can take many forms, knockout, round robin, league and can be organised for senior or junior players, tag and full contact, 10 a side, 7 a side etc.. A tournament can be used for fund raising, for recruiting players, just for fun or all three together!
Organising a successful tournament however can be challenging. Beforehand you have the promotion and advertisement of the tournament, invitation of other clubs, schools or players, and the recruitment of volunteers to referee, coach or just help out on the day.
On the day itself there is the movement of people to organise and get matches started promptly, the referees, rules and of course the scoring and ranking of teams in the tournament format you have chosen.
Computerizing the tournament organisation
At Northwich RUFC we have been reguarly organising both junior and senior tournaments for a number of years. While it is always a challenge to get teams invited and manpower to help, we did find that the larger the tournament becomes, the logistics of the event itself can become difficult to handle. For example, there are a lot of match cards to write out and distribute, if there a lot of draws in league phases of an event disputes can quickly develop if there is no clear rules on how placing should be setup, delays in organisation can also demotivate young players who don’t want to hang around, especially if the weather is not good.
To help make us more efficient during match days and avoid some of the problems described above we decided to enlist the help of a computer. Prompted by the example of free spreadsheets made available by newspapers during the Football World Cup in 2002 we decided to adapt the idea into something we could use and reuse for our own rugby tournaments.
However many of the free examples were password protected, but thanks to a fortunate email we managed to ‘open up’ one of the spreadsheets and after trying to make sense how it worked have now tuned it to our own requirements.
Versions for you
We now have 2 generic versions of the spreadsheet which we used last season succesfully during a number of tournaments. These can quickly be used for new tournaments and of course new teams by simply typing them into a single worksheet. Match cards for the first round or league phase can then be printed out immediately with a spreadsheet showing the teams, and draw respresented in different colours and graphics.
As the spreadsheets helped us out and allowed our tournaments to run efficiently and professionally we believe that they will also be able to help you run your own tournaments better. So we are making copies available to other clubs. Here is some information on the two tournament types we currently have developed.
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