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1. Plan it

Who: coordinator · When: 1–2 weeks before · You need: the organizer's brief: the date or dates, the venues and how many courts each has, the hours each venue gives you, and a count of entries per category (an estimate is fine)

The cheapest place to find out an event doesn't fit is here. Moving a number in the calculator costs nothing. Moving it after the workbook is generated means starting the workbook again.

Choose the format

Pick the format first. It decides which master workbook you copy and which site template the developer uses. See the three kinds of event.

Choose the keys

Two kinds of key, both chosen now and used byte-identically from here on.

  • The event key, for example pnf-x-bup-dual-meet. Lowercase letters, digits and hyphens. It becomes the event's folder name in the site repo and in event-data, its key in events.json, and it is typed into the workbook's Title tab.
  • A day key for each tournament day, for example pnf-bup-day1. The same characters. Day keys must be unique across every event ever registered, not just this one, because a day key is also part of the address each sync is sent to. Prefix it with something specific to the event (<event-key>-day1).

Write both down in a place the coordinator and the developer can see. A key typed two ways is the most common cause of an event that "looks right and does nothing".

Steps

  1. Open the Tournament Calculator and set the format: Standard tournament or Dual meet.
  2. Add the categories. For a dual meet give each a pairs per club count and a bracket count. For a standard tournament give each a team count, a bracket group size and how many advance to playoffs.
  3. Set the courts and the match duration, with any buffer between matches.
  4. For a category with a single bracket, choose how the medals are decided: Twice-to-beat final, or Round robin only. The choice is per category, and the finish time updates as you switch.
  5. If the event runs across several days or venues, make one plan per day (and per venue, for a standard tournament).
  6. Check the finish time against the hours the organizer has the venue. If it is too late, agree a change with the organizer (courts, match length or bracket sizes) and make it here, not later.
  7. When the plan is right, click Copy plan & open generator. It puts the plan on your clipboard and opens the copy dialog of the master for the plan's format. Keep that tab open for step 2.

Check it worked: the calculator shows a total match count and a finish time you accept, and a new tab has opened on the master workbook's Make a copy dialog. If the clipboard is blocked (some browsers block it on non-secure pages), the button says so: use Export CSV and paste the file's contents into the generator instead.

If it doesn't: nothing in the live system is touched by the calculator, so there is nothing to undo. The calculator remembers your plan between visits.

Where the formats differ

  • Dual meet: the plan needs pairs per club, and the calculator accounts for the cross-club Bronze and Final matches that format produces.
  • Standard: one plan per venue per day, and you tick each venue's categories in the generator later.
  • Team: the calculator has no team format yet (its spec is not started). Plan by hand to PickleDrive's shape: 15 teams A–O in three brackets of five, four pairs per matchup, 152 matches and 10 courts. There is no plan to copy. Skip to step 2.

Next: 2. Build the workbooks.