Titanic Open: Part Two, The Event
If I had to choose the single most difficult part of running a fencing tournament, It would be the setup of the tournament, the running of the tournament, and the breakdown of the tournament. Setup as you may have already read was just like a dream. I fully expected the dream to be over at 7am when I go into my office with a bag of coffee to brew for the staff and the referees. The last precious moments of peace and sanity were spent at my desk making last minute emails and a hoodie for Henri (sounds like a band).
Back in the day, we operated on "fencing time", registration might close at the time you posted, but fencing would start when it started and not a second before. Back then, for each fencer you had to have a waiver, and a fencer card. The fencer card was a 3X5 card, one for each fencer in each event. The card listed their name, club and rating in the competition. Once registration closed these cards would be separated by club for each event and ranked in order with the highest rated fencer on top and the lowest at the bottom. For all of the unrated fencers you tended to have to call a representitive from their club to come over and rate them for you. Once you have a pile of cards for each club you formed pools dividing the clubs and the skill levels between all of the pools with the goal of making each pool of equal difficulty. When the results of the first round of pools came in you had to transfer everyone's scores and statistics over to their individual card, and with that informaiton create a second round of pools, this one more even than the previous based on the statistics from the first pool. Once that pool was finished you would copy that information over to each fencer's card and set up the direct elimination tree so common in other sports. Now imagine if you will, you are holding in one day three events and thirty people showed up. Half of those people were competing in two events and say five were going to fence all three. That means that as the organizer you have fifty cards to keep up with and updated. A good organized team of experienced event staff could start an event about a 45 minutes to an hour after the close of registration. Back in the UNCG fencing days, we seldom held more than one event per day, and with our most organized and skilled event staff the fencing could run on into the evening as late as 9pm. Remember, registration closed at 9am.
Now instead of running on fencing time, we run with "Fencing Time". This tournament was the very first time I would use this software, and I admit I was more than a little worried about trying to run a tournament with 18 events per day using a piece of software I had never used before.
OMFG! This is the coolest software ever. Its very existance could prove the existance of god, and I am not exagerating. In the old days one event might take 45 minutes to an hour to get started initially, and it could easily take another 45 minutes to an hour between pools and before direct eliminateion. Now the only lag between close of registration and start of pools is the speed of your desktop printer. Fencing Time did everything but referee. I was able to download all of our preregistrants into a format that the software could use to put them with their information into their events. Once the whole tournament was finished, I was able to export a file with the results that I was able to suck back up into the website for instant posting of the results. They simply thought of everything.
I could spend the rest of this posting singing the praises of the best $50.00 anyone involved with fencing can spend, but I have more praise to heap around, and I am afraid I might be boring to read so on we go.
One of the things we did right was have event staff T-shirts made in a nice bright color. The other was putting those t-shirts on the best bunch of adults and teens one could hope for. Nothing that needed doing was left undone. Everyone worked well together and helped to make our tournament a raging success. Not only from the standpoint of logistics, but just plain good public relations. One of our veteran fencers brought in some outdoor lawn signs pointing the way to the parking lot as well as the building, this helped not only the fencers comming in from out of town, but also the curious, who had never really seen fencing before. One of our parent's contacted the News and Record and the result was six hours of reporter/photographer time and one of the best write ups I have ever seen on fencing in Greensboro. We had a father son team running our merchandicing booth, and a fencer's father helped in the armory, while a fencer's mom manned registration with me taking fees, and getting waivers signed. Even our fencer's who weren't eligable to fence, turned out to score, timekeep, and even referee. As amazing a job as the software did of the administrative side of fencing, our club members and parents were just as amazing at the people side. We couldn't have had such a positive reaction from participants, parents, and fans without them.
I couldn't be more thrilled to be involved in fencing, and all the demons I brought with me were cast out thanks to this event, and I have everyone to thank for that.
