How can we help make your tournament a success?

Step 1: Registration Form

As part of our setup, we'll convert your traditional paper or electronic (Word, PDF) registration form. All the events will be coded, broken down by weight and skill. We'll setup the rules to prevent registration conflicts. This is done by age (don't allow a person to register in a teen event and a master's event), by skill (can't compete as a white belt and a blue belt) and by gender.

Event pricing is either flat (one price for all events) or flat plus (one price to enter, additional cost for additional events). With flat plus pricing, some events can be offered at no extra cost (absolute division).

Step 2: Online Registration

Link to the registration form from your website. As people register they'll get email confirmation and you'll get email notification. You'll also be able to see a chart showing how your events are filling up:

Payment

Competitors will be directed to PayPal to make payment.

After they pay, the confirmation email from PayPal will show the competitor's name, phone number, and team. You can then mark them as paid in the registration system.

Paper registration

When competitors send paper registrations, you then key them into the system yourself. If they include a valid email address, they'll receive confirmation. It is recommended that you cut-off paper registration a week before the tournament. Otherwise, you'll be in a situation where you'll have to key in a large amount of data the night before or morning of the tournament.

Early registration discount

You can set a cutoff date and penalty amount to encourage early registration. The system will automatically change the price after the cutoff passes.

Step 3: Walkups and Weigh Ins

Typically, weigh-ins are done the afternoon before the tournament. This is also when alot of people register. This goes very smoothly, as long as you have a computer with internet and a printer at the weigh-in location. It's simple and quick to update each competitor's registration status with their weight and payment information. If you have a second computer available, walk-up registrants can key in their own information so you don't have to.

Step 4: Making the brackets

Once you close registration, a single click will generate the brackets based on the events people signed up for. It's simple to adjust the brackets: splitting large brackets or merging small brackets is all done online. Brackets are automatically balanced to keep teammates from meeting in early rounds.

Another click will email each competitor a link to his bracket. Brackets can then be printed for use at the tournament.

Step 4: Running the tournament

At the tournament, the first thing to do is weigh in the competitors who did not weigh in the night before. No-shows are also dropped from brackets, a simple process that only requires you to reprint the bracket. Each score table can use the printed bracket to schedule and score their event. When they return the completed bracket to the head score table, the results can be entered and will be immediately available on the web page.

As the results are entered, the team scores are tallied. The webpage updates automatically to show all the results along with the brackets.

What do you need?

The requirements are very modest:

• Internet access
• A printer
• A tournament

It's hard enough to run a good tournament. You have to advertise and get the officials and get the venue and run the events. We developed MartialArtsBrackets.com to help us run our tournament brackets and we can run yours as well!