How To: Creating a Non-Conference Tourney

Non-Conference Tourney Creation

This is one of the most difficult aspects of all Hoops Dynasty, getting users together to schedule games against one another. It is fun to create and implement but it requires a lot of time and effort in regards to keeping track of those involved and ensuring that all games are scheduled properly because even the slightest mess up will destroy the conference tourney.

Number of Teams/Conferences

This will depend on the interest of the tourney. Who is interested in participating and what their commitment level. It is better to have slightly more conferences and teams available. I have personally done it with 4 conferences before with 5 teams from each conference. This worked okay when the members actually were interested enough in getting everything setup and the games set correctly. The LEG work for this as the person in charge is very difficult. 

Team Composition/Rating the teams that are invited

This is vital, you need to know which team is the best team available in the conference to give them a higher seed with easier games to win. In my template I had the following: 

• Senior Player Rating * 3
• Junior Player Rating * 2
• Sophomore Player Rating * 1

I took the number I received from adding all of these together by the total number of these players. This made the score even for all teams and gave me a great indication of those teams that were higher rated. Now, this system is not flawless, but it does give a semblance in terms of ranking the seeds. 

This gave a pretty good indicator of which teams were going to be good the next season because let's be honest teams that have more juniors and seniors are going to do better each and every season. 

**Look for an update to this section when I am able to determine a different and better rating system**

Seeding/Scheduling Games

This relates to the composition of the teams and once you have the best team per conference and their seed in the tourney you will then need to schedule the games. This is what I did each time. I labeled each conference with a letter and each seed with a number. I followed the following schedule: 

As you can see from this picture I scheduled the highest seeds against each other from each conference to boost their RPI and also allow them to have an opportunity to win the games. Now again this is not perfect but as you can see by the rank, the sum of the seeds they play) this made the games fair for those that were lower on the totem pole in terms of rating of the team. Now to schedule this in terms of home and away games I used the following: (Note that this was for the last time I actually did a conference tourney)

As you can see above this gave away and home games for all involved and was connected to the participating teams seed sheet in the excel document. This allowed for all involved to be able to schedule their games and for me to determine who won and who lost as indicated in the sheet. The Draws were those that did not schedule the game correctly. 

Summary

In summary, it is a huge undertaking but can be beneficial for all involved as well as to see which conference is the best conference. I really actually enjoyed doing this and currently because of this post am thinking about doing it again this coming season in the Knight World DI, DII, and DIII because I can at least set it up for all involved or those that are interested. 

I hope that you enjoyed this post and if you would like any additional information I would be happy to update this post for the future.