Four days until my tournament. Nothing left to do but panic!
Posted by chrissmithspresence
If you have read any of my earlier posts, then you know I am organizing my first tournament. I decided to go with an a-typical tournament format in the hopes that I would create something fun and memorable for all players involved.
The tournament is really coming together. In my last post I talked about finding local sponsors to go along with my more national “disc golf” sponsors. As an update, the local sponsors didn’t pan out as well as I had hoped. No worries though. I got a few more prizes and hopefully those companies will benefit from the donation and be willing to donate again in the future. I have over fifty people pre-registered and over 35 prizes to give out.
One thing that I found was that I kept going over things that needed to be done in my head and thinking “Oh yeah, I’ll do that later.”
When I decided to actually sit down and make a list of things to get done, I was overwhelmed. I walked through the player’s experience on tournament day in my head. Here is what I am looking at with four days left:
- When they show up, where will they go? – I’ll need a table for registration and one to display the prizes.
- How do I split them up into random partners and cards? – I need to get some poker chips and write numbers on them (I also considered ripping a deck of cards in half)
- How am I going to communicate all of these crazy rules? – I made a score card specific to the tournament with the “special” rules on the back. It only cost me $2.80 to get them printed on card stock. I also made a one-page list of the holes and what is different about each, to post around the registration area.
- What the heck am I going to say at the player’s meeting? – I wrote up an outline and listed all of the sponsors so that I don’t forget to thank anyone.
- How are players going to mark their longest putts and CTPs? – I bought four dowels from a hardware store, cut them into four pieces and made duct tape flags to make 16 markers.
- Anything specific to the tournament that needs to be done? – I needed to buy some field paint to mark a drop zone for a mando, a putting circle for one special rule, and specific distances from baskets because we will be using a putting game for a tie breaker.
- What else am I forgetting? – I committed to sending pictures of the winners with their prizes to companies that donated. Too bad I don’t have a very good camera. Maybe someone would be willing to come take pictures and/or videos. I posted it to the facebook and disc golf scene and the wife of one of the players is going to help me out.
So that’s it… If I continue to check more things off of my list than I add every day, I should be ok. I am sure that it won’t go completely as planned, but if I roll with the punches, I am hoping that it is a fun tournament for everyone involved.