How to direct a tournament

[BuzzerZen]

As part of the PACE bootcamp a couple weeks ago, I created this document, entitiled "Tournament Directing: Some of the Dharma." It is distributed under a Creative commons by-nc-sa license, so feel free to modify and redistribute it, as long as you release your version under the same license and give me credit. I hope people find this useful. I plan to update this document periodically as I learn things or think of other important things about directing tournaments. Enjoy.

Edit: If you have input, please do share it, so I can correct whatever idiocies I may have inserted.

Edit 2: I'm going to passive-aggressively move this back to Theory, because more people look at that forum and I'm a whore for traffic.

[Jeremy Gibbs Lemma]

Very good document there..... it pretty much covered everything.

[jrbellas]

The list is excellent and I wouldn't delete a thing.

I would ADD one thing, and make this a very high priority: Run your tournament on time. I've always struggled with this at my events, and nothing pisses people off more than running behind, especially when they are losing and have a long drive home. Teams will not return to tournaments that are behind schedule, even if its not the TD's fault. Nor should they.

I would also advise staying away from providing lunch, unless you know you have the people to help pull it off. Its just one more headache for the TD, and if you send teams off campus for an hour, it gives you time to crunch stats like crazy. However, I've seen TDs run the lunch thing as well, and make big bucks doing it, so I suppose more power to those people.

Thanks for the advice - I will send this to a few local TDs to look at.

[Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN)]

Where's the plug for Academic Initiative PACE sets?????

Actually, a minor thing I thought of is asking tournaments to affiliate with a national tournament and how to do that, although of course it's not always necessary.