Tournament Divisions

If you've been following along, our practice tournament is starting to come together. We now have 4 clubs entered each with 1 team in the Regular classification and a single judge. Now let's get these 4 teams organized into a division and define the format of racing for them.

Add a division

Navigate to the Tournament Divisions screen. You will see that our practice tournament does not have any divisions listed. Click the "Add Division" button.

We need to add a division to the Regular class. Use the dropdown menu to select "Regular". When Flyball Manager adds a division to a tournament, the division number is automatically handled for you. Each time you create a division, the division number for the class is automatically incremented.

Click the "Create" button. You will see our divisions list now shows a Regular 1 division.

Division setup

We need to fill in the details for this division. Here we will list how many teams are in the division, the racing format, the judge and points awarded for both heat/race wins.

Click Regular 1 in the division list to select it. The right side of the screen now becomes active. Here you can see the details of the classification, division number, breakout time (calculate from the team entries), racing format, judge and tournament points.

Our division has no details just yet so let's add them in!

Team count

The team count field indicates how many teams should be in this division. For our practice tournament, we set up 4 teams. Enter "4" in the Team Count field to include all these teams in this division. Now Flyball Manager knows our tournament will have 4 teams in the Regular 1 division.

In a real tournament you will create divisions as needed. For each of those divisions you enter the number of teams you desire to have in the division.

The total for a particular class (i.e. "Regular") should match the total number of teams entered for that class on the Entries screen. If 14 teams were entered in the Regular class on the Entries screen, the total number of all "Team Count" fields for Regular divisions should be 14.

Racing format

Next we need to let Flyball Manager know the format this division will be racing under. We are allowed to have up to 2 different formats for a division. This allows for teams to race some number of round robins in one format (4 out of 4) and at some point change to a different format (3 out of 3) in order to keep the total heat races to a certain amount.

Typically, divisions will race under the same format for the entire tournament. Flyball Manager provides the flexibility to allow changes to the format if desired.

For our practice tournament, the Regular 1 division will run a round-robin sequence 3 times using the 4 out of 4 format for racing. In the "Racing Format" section, for "Rounds" select 3 indicating we desire 3 round-robin cycles. In the "Format" menu, select "4/4" indicating we wish the race format to be "4 out of 4".

This format will be used throughout the entire schedule for this division. We can leave the 2nd race format option with empty values.

Judge

Each division needs to have a judge assigned to it. For our practice tournament we set up a single judge in a previous section. Now we need to assign this judge to our Regular 1 division.

In the Judge drop-down menu, select the judge listed. In my case this is Thomas Lamont.

Tournament points

And finally, we need to set up how points are awarded for this division. In the tournament points section enter the point values as defined for your tournament. In our practice tournament, 1 point is assigned for each heat win, .5 point for a heat tie, and 0 points for a heat loss. No points are given for wining the most heats. We will leave the "Race" points blank.

EXCELLENT! We've really made some progress getting our practice tournament setup.

Let's have a look at our seed chart.