The shape of it
The day is an exception-handling problem
A tournament schedule is a prediction. It is correct until the first team arrives late, the first official calls in sick, or the first court runs four minutes over. After that, the question is no longer whether the plan holds but how quickly you can produce a new one.
The organisations that have a calm tournament day are not the ones with a better plan. They are the ones who can re-plan in under a minute and tell everyone affected without leaving the desk.
- Changes are frequent, small and urgent, rather than rare and large
- Every change has an audience: officials, teams, the scorer's table
- The cost of a change is mostly the cost of communicating it
- A printed schedule is wrong from the first exception onwards
Before
What has to be ready the night before
Almost everything that makes the day hard is decided before it starts. If the referee pool is incomplete, the categories are not mapped to courts, or nobody has confirmed availability, the day becomes an improvisation.
Publish the schedule to the officials, not just to the organisers. A game card by email and an iCal subscription mean every official arrives knowing their own day, which removes the single largest source of morning questions.
- Referee pool imported, with level, certifications and availability per slot
- Categories mapped to courts, with rest periods set per category
- Auto-fill run, and the games it could not fill resolved by hand
- Schedule published: game cards sent, iCal feed live
- A named person on the desk who owns substitutions
The first hour
The first hour
Check attendance against the assignment list before the first game, not after. An official who is missing at 08:45 is an inconvenience; the same official discovered missing at 09:05 is a delayed court.
Confirm the courts are running to the same clock. In 3x3 the game length is short enough that a four-minute overrun on one court silently breaks the rest periods you designed on another, because the referee you planned to move is still on the floor.
Exceptions
The four things that go wrong
In practice, tournament day exceptions fall into four kinds. Each one has the same answer: reassign, then notify.
A no-show is the simplest, and the most expensive if it is found late. A delay is the most common. An injury or a withdrawal mid-day removes capacity you had already allocated. And a reassignment you made yourself, to balance workload or to put a stronger official on a harder game, is an exception too, with the same communication cost.
The live court view is what makes these tractable: it shows what is running, what is next, and which games have nobody standing on them. Substitution reassigns and pushes the change to the people affected. Everything downstream stays intact.
- No-show: substitute from the available pool, respecting the rest rule
- Delay: the following games shift rather than the schedule being discarded
- Mid-day withdrawal: capacity drops, and the remaining games redistribute
- Deliberate reassignment: the same mechanism, used on purpose
After
Closing the day
Close the day while people are still in the hall. Hours worked, games covered and evaluations are far easier to capture at the venue than to reconstruct on Monday from memory and a photographed sheet of paper.
The output is a tournament report: games played, referees used, fill rate, hours per official and the evaluations recorded against them. That report is what you take into the next event, and what turns one day of officiating into evidence about who is ready for more.
FAQ
Common questions
How far in advance should the schedule be published to referees?
Far enough that an official can tell you they cannot make it while you still have time to replace them. The practical answer is as soon as auto-fill resolves and you have filled the remaining gaps by hand.
What happens to the schedule when one court runs late?
The following games on that court shift. Because rest periods are checked against actual assignments rather than planned times, you can see immediately which referees the delay affects.
Can more than one person manage the day?
Yes. Admin seats are per plan, and every change is recorded in an audit log, so two people on a desk do not overwrite each other's work silently.
Do referees need an app?
No. Game cards arrive by email and the schedule is an iCal subscription in whatever calendar they already use.
What do I get at the end of the day?
A tournament report: games, referees, fill rate, hours per official and the evaluations recorded during the day, exportable for your own administration.
Your turn
Run your next tournament day through it
Bring the game list and the referee pool from your last event and we will show you the same day as it would have run.
Book a demo