Project-Manage Your Tournament To Success

Everyone’s raring to get back on the field, and we need well-run tournaments to make it happen. With this adaptable planning spreadsheet and phase-by-phase guide, you too can manage a small- to medium-sized weekend event with flair!

I started playing ultimate in 1985 and have coached high school ultimate for 17 years. I am also a USA Ultimate-certified Tournament Director (TD), and strongly recommend that potential TDs consider getting this certification. In the past decade, the Cincinnati Ultimate Players Association (CUPA) has run local tournaments as well as large-scale USAU and WFDF events, including the 2014 and 2017 D-I College Championships and the 2018 World Ultimate Club Championships. I have assisted with many of these events and learned a lot — often from my mistakes! My kids also have played and coached in many WFDF and USAU tournaments, so I have some good learnings from attending tournaments outside of Ohio.

My non-ultimate job has been leading technical project teams as a certified Project Management Professional. Given my PM background, I run each tournament as a project organized into 5 phases (initiation, planning, execution, monitoring, and closure). Each phase has distinct deliverables and milestones which a TD should find useful.

From this experience, I’ve provided a multi-page, customizable planning spreadsheet that can be tailored to the needs of your event, which the rest of this article will complement.

The master planning spreadsheet contains several pages detailing various parts of the tournament planning process that should work for most tournaments. Many can be copied for your own use as checklists or sample forms:

This article supports that spreadsheet with a friendly, conversational overview of the five phases and considerations for each. To help keep it interesting (and to further demonstrate I am a Great Grand Masters player), I added at least 10 R.E.M. and Sesame Street references — see how many you can find!

1. INITIATION PHASE 9–12 months before the event

Determine why you are running your tournament. Is it to make money for your team or disc organization? To provide sanctioned playing opportunities for area club teams? To cap off a fun summer or youth league?

Your why piece will help you determine your financial scale, your target audience, and your pool of potential volunteers. It is the event’s reason for being, and it is the foundation for answering all the questions that follow.

You can also use this first phase to identify your tournament director (TD) and ideally a few other key volunteer positions, such as assistant TD, facilities lead, or division coordinators.

2. PLANNING PHASE 2–9 months before the event

Being TD is not an easy job, but if you lay a solid foundation in the planning phase, it can be fun. Planning is where you work out the high-level details and start to generate excitement for your event. You can browse the topic outlines and sample checklists in the planning spreadsheet for a fine-grained overview, but before you get overwhelmed, consider these four “w” items to focus your work in this phase:

See the “Site Visit Checklist” tab of the planning spreadsheet for more on how to assess potential tournament sites.

WHERE and WHEN: These two items are intertwined. Timing-wise, it is good to reserve your field nine to twelve months in advance (lots of competition with soccer!). Be optimistic and err on the side of booking more fields than you think you may need, as you can typically cancel a few fields without little penalty on sufficient notice.

Also, try to not to interfere with other ultimate events in the area. For instance, CUPA never schedules any tournaments on the same weekend of Poultry Days.

WHAT TYPE OF EVENT: You also need to determine whether the tournament will be USAU-sanctioned, and (in a summer club season) whether you will make it part of the club series events. Many club teams prefer a sanctioned club tournament as it helps them fulfill the minimum number of sanctioned games they need to play, and also helps the section get more invites to regionals.

From a TD’s perspective, there is a bit more paperwork involved in sanctioning a tournament through USAU, but you also get to use USAU insurance for the event, as well as their score reporting interface for tracking pool play and bracket play results. (Plus, the staff at USAU is always willing to use their expertise to help you run a quality event!)

WHO TO INVITE: Once you understand if the tournament will be sanctioned or not, you can determine which divisions (men’s, women’s, or mixed) your tournament will host, as well as which teams in those divisions might attend. Good ways to get the word out about your tournament include social media platforms (such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, or Instagram), listing it on the USAU Tournament Calendar, or sending emails to the teams who’ve attended previous tournaments. Start this marketing as early as four to six months prior to the event — early enough to reach teams planning seasons — and follow up monthly.

Review the planning spreadsheet page-by-page for a detailed overview of tasks to be done in this phase, including setting the budget, creating medical or inclement weather plans, ordering items for the tournament, and finding volunteers.

3. EXECUTION PHASE 2 months before the event through the tournament

See “Sample Volunteer Roles” on the planning spreadsheet for more.

The execution phase is where the details really matter. This is where the tournament directors need to Communicate and Coordinate with the teams, Collaborate with the volunteers and the local organizations providing the fields and other services, Clarify any questions and get Commitment from everyone involved.

The secret for success in this phase is division of labor. Too many TDs try to do everything themselves — using volunteers to assist lessens the load and grows the ultimate community. A few suggested positions that will make a huge difference:

How to find these people? The best way is to approach potential volunteers directly, and with a role in mind for them. You’ll be surprised at how many folks say yes. You may also need to advertise for the job. In that event, have good role descriptions available online and an accessible signup sheet that lists these roles along with times when help is needed. (And if you can afford volunteer swag, get it — discs and/or shirts are great volunteer magnets.)

Some items to highlight for the actual day(s) of the tournament:

Monitoring describes all the steps taken throughout the tournament lifecycle to ensure that the tasks and deliverables for that stage of the tournament are being completed. That feedback can also help you determine if changes need to be made to the tournament plan. Typically you would have monthly monitoring meetings in the initiation and planning phases, and then increase the frequency in the execution phase as you get closer to the event. A good place for monitoring meetings is a local restaurant or pub so that you can meet over a meal and drinks to exchange information and build working relationships.

As the overall leader for the tournament, the TD should run the Monitoring meetings and confirm things are moving along. The TD should never assume things are getting done; instead, they need to gently push, pull, and/or nag their leads to deliver and then be 100% certain that tasks are completed. Meeting notes should document progress measured, decisions made, issues uncovered, and next steps as well as their associated owners.

When the action items are clearly understood, assigned to owners, and moved along by a TD and their team working well together, the challenging task of running a tournament looks easy.

5. CLOSURE PHASE Complete within 4 weeks after event

Hooray, hooray, hip hip hooray! The tournament has happened. However, your work as a TD is not done — there are several key items still ahead:

It’s the end of the article and you know it — do you feel fine? Running a quality tournament is challenging but fulfilling, and a great way to make money for your organization.

Sunny days are ahead of us — help make it possible to come and play!

Mike Kaylor has been playing ultimate since Reagan was president and is an active member of the Cincinnati Ultimate Players Association. In addition to wondering how his kids surpassed his ultimate skills, he is a high school coach, a tournament director, and a GGM player on Age Against The Machine. Mike and his partner Deb currently live in the UK and are trying to start new youth programs in the Manchester area.

TAGGED: Cincinnati Ultimate Players Association, organization, tournament directors, Tournaments

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