A tournament in our state transpired last weekend and ended up 4 hours behind the posted agenda. Several folks had concerns ahead of time, but alas, the event went forward anyway. Curious if anyone has optimized the schedule for a 32 team event to get everyone 3 driver and 3 auton skills runs, 5/6 qualification matches per team, lunch, alliance selection, finals, and still managed to get everyone home in time for dinner.
My school is hosting in January. I’ve hosted every year for almost 10 years and I think we can still trim the fat off in different areas to save time overall.
To optimize time, we are:
opening inspection on Friday so teams can show up Saturday and immediately start running skills.
scheduling interviews with judges so teams can plan skills around that interview time slot.
keeping skills open during lunch
moving the pits closer to the competition fields to minimize running back and forth
Does anyone else have advice on how to pack everything in to optimize it more?
I helped with a VRC event last weekend with 23 teams. We had two comp fields. That worked well with a good field resetter. It’s much better to have two scoring refs per field. One ref does the red points and goes and confirms with the red alliance, and blue to theirs. Two people can use the app at the same time and it updates the other screen. It’s really nice. They did 8 matches per team and we got done in good time.
I would have at least two skills fields and get it started as soon as possible after the teams are inspected. We ended up having a half hour after the tournament to run skills on all of the fields to get more attempts in. It still seemed like about half of the overall attempts were used.
What was cause of schedule slippage? too short match cycle, field issues, resetting?..
our configuration
we have three competition fields
teams coming to the field reset the field (motivated teams are happy to get field setup quickly)
dedicated skills field and we can swap over practice fields for skills
Digital submission of notebooks that are reviewed prior to event
it is team’s responsibility to be at field when their match is coming up - we do not have runners to hunt them down
we have pit close to competition fields (two adjoining gyms)
There is no way to guarantee that all teams get 6 skills runs, just the opportunity to do so…
Have coach do robot inspection checklist prior to coming to event - this does speed up things…
Early season five minute match cycle - we must run 6 qualification rounds per Qualifying Criteria doc. We tend to run 7-8… For Championships, two day event 48 teams we run 1 practice round for each team and 9-10 qualification rounds.
We ran a tournament this weekend with 5 minute cycle times. Keep telling the kids that they need to help keep things on-time as well. Getting tournaments completed in a timely manner is something EVERYONE contributes towards - EP, Head Ref, Teams, etc. Teams must show up to matches on-time. If you fall behind schedule significantly, don’t be afraid to run matches without waiting for all teams to show up. Have an announcement made that Match 123 is on the field, missing team 9876Z and will start in 1 minute regardless. If you can run ahead of schedule - do so - bank those minutes for when someone trips over a wire, or a match needs to be rerun because of a field fault.
If Murphy does strike - be prepared to proceed in…unconventional ways. Last year, I reffed a tournament where TM crashed 2 matches into Elims. We spent significant time trying to bring it back to life, but ultimately when with the manual competition switches and a stopwatch.
-Does 3 fields make things faster than just 2 fields? I was thinking while one is begin scored/set, the other would be running.
-Teams resetting fields, that is a great idea!
-digital submissions are for sure a thing for all our events as well
-love the teams resetting the match fields as well, with oversight to make sure
The schedule that was run last weekend was a HS tournament with some experienced middle school teams that joined:
8:00 AM - 8:30 AM Team Check-in
8:15 AM - 9:00 AM Robot Inspection
8:15 AM - 10:00 AM Skills Open & Judges Interviews
10:15 AM - 12:15 PM Skills Closes & Qualification rounds
12:15 PM - 12:45 PM Lunch
12:45 PM - 3:00 PM Finish Qualification Matches & Finals Matches
3:15 PM - 3:30 PM Awards Presentation
If the game is hard to score…like the yards of string last season…then 3 fields help. Typically 2 field are fine to keep things moving…but your queueing personnel need to stay on the ball to keep things moving.
8:00am opening time is pretty late, especially with inspection not starting until 8:15am. Around here doors will typically open at 7:30 or earlier (with larger events trending towards 7:00am), with inspection starting around 7:30 as well. Getting everyone inspected is generally the constraint in the morning so early season events where students are getting used to new robot rules,e tc can be a bit slower. It can help to have a person with a checklist of uninspected teams to walk around and prompt them to get inspected, especially as the inspection closing time approaches.
45 minutes to inspect 32 teams is going to be challenging even for a well-organized inspection team. That’s a little less than 1 team per minute at 32 teams. In AZ we’ll often have 90 minutes for inspection.
Running skills exclusively before qualification matches is not going to work very well, teams need time between skills runs and they won’t easily cram 6 skills runs per team into 2 hours.
Starting matches at 10:15, 1 hour after inspection closes isn’t going to leave much time for matches if you want to get out at a reasonable time. As written, this schedule was hoping to get 48 matches done in 2.75 hours (assuming 1.5 hours for alliance selection and elimination rounds), which is about 3.4 minutes per match. That’s an extremely fast cycle time, and is approaching what they do at the world championship where they have 3 fields and some of the most experienced volunteers in the whole program. I would not attempt this, especially very early on in the season.
Broadly, you should be calculating the amount of time things like matches etc. will take at a given velocity and also verify if that velocity is feasible. If that had been done at the mentioned event then they would have seen during the planning stages that 2.75 hours for all qualification matches just isn’t feasible.
3 fields will always make things able to go faster unless you can somehow:
Score the field
Deal with any rules questions
Remove robots
Setup the field
Setup the new robots
In less than 120 seconds or so (the time it takes to run a match). Thus far in my 10 years of being involved with VEX I have never seen this achieved. 3 fields will double the amount of time able to be allocated to scoring, resetting, setup, etc. without affecting the runtime of the event.
It is, but keep in mind that the demands on students’ time are many at an event and that also smaller/single student teams may be disproportionately affected by having to reset the field themselves. If you have the option, a dedicated reset team is almost always going to be better, and more consistent.
Last year I started adding a 30 minute break in qualification matches at around 10 or 10:30 am for judges to interview those hard-to-find teams and for robots to get additional skills runs. Many of the teams did not take advantage, but I had a plan that if things got crowded, teams would get a maximum of 1 driver and 1 autonomous run during that break. Teams (and judges) have been supportive of this addition. Some of them just to have a chance to fix problems that arose during their first two matches.
For the rest I have had no real problem with 32 teams on a 4.5 minute cycle to go along with 1 head referee, 1 assistant head referee, two scoring referees, and 3/4 field resetters. Everyone but the head referee (and sometimes the assistant) stays at the same field.
not run faster, but reliably - when you have teams disputing a call, field reset issues, and field electronic issues… It is how we avoid running too late - once we get started we are pretty consistent with flow.
Thank you very much for this answer! Very well thought out. We definitely are going to incorporate some these ideas. We are opening inspection the day before and allowing teams to come in earlier Saturday morning so we can get matches starting earlier.
This season’s game should be able to run 4.5 minute match cycle times if scoring is done on tablets and the refs are familiar with the rules and can quickly determine the winner of auton. As for skills, I was at a similar tournament this weekend (it may have been the same one) and only 24 teams ran skills at all and only 1 team got 5 runs while the average was 3 runs from the teams that ran skills. The problem was that it was taking way too long to tally scores (on paper) and reset the fields and enter the scores in the computer before starting the next match. Match cycle times for skills should be around 2 to 2.5 minutes rather than around 5 minutes. If there are enough volunteers, you can also run skills on the competition fields during lunch break.
The tournament where I was unfortunately had to change the location where they were holding the tournament and that caused issues with the network forcing them to score on paper rather than tablet. They had people willing to help that were turned down early in the day but fortunately accepted help after lunch which helped speed things up a bit after lunch. There were experienced parents from my team who volunteered to help with skills but were turned away saying they had everything they needed but in fact, that was slower than match play at times and match play was slower than it should have been.
Running faster isn’t always better. You still need time for the judges to get all the interviews done, for teams to reset between matches, and get all the skills runs in. If you set the schedule really tight and have a delay then you have problems, its harder on all your volunteers and parents get irritated. I like to work with a realistic schedule. Teams know when they are supposed to be at the field and can plan accordingly.
This season, 3 fields does not make as much of a difference as it has in some other seasons because the matches can get scored quickly and reset quickly. With two fields, you should be able to start a match as soon as the ref is ready. Last season, a 3rd field was very helpful. Back in Nothing But Net, even with 3 fields, that was going to go slow.
Just ran event yesterday - third field would have helped with new scoring team. Ran ok with 4m match cycle, was able to push through 3 on some… but if had 3rd field would have been able to cycle through with ease.
Never regretted doing 3 fields for 48 team events.
We are running a dual event - HS & MS - each with two fields. The idea is that we will run two rounds of HS qualifications while our MS teams do skills and meet with judges. Then we flip and the MS run qualifications while the HS does skills and judging. I technically only need one head ref for two events and it leaves time for teams to complete all of the tasks expected of them.
I am planning on a cycle time of five minutes with two fields. We started our leagues with long cycle times ( 6- 8 min on one field) but the practice at leagues has allowed our ref team to become much more efficient.
Make sure you are doing the math when it comes to the number of fields. Each field consumes eight teams from the pits - four on the field and four in the queue. Events with three fields will potentially tie up 24 teams. Yes, the event will go faster, but teams may not have time to meet with judges or run skills.
Skills fields are another concern. Each team has six attempts - 3 driver and 3 programming.
48 teams x 6 attempts = is 288 runs x 5 minutes = is 24 hours. If you have four dedicated fields it’s still six hours of capacity. Granted, not every team will want to run skills but I have been to events where teams are standing in line for skills while coordinating matches and judging. Not a positive experience.
One thing I’ve seen tournaments do in the past is open skills on Friday night, I’m not sure if this would be possible for y’all but it helps a lot for allowing people to finish skills and have more availability for interviews on Saturday.
3 fields would definitely help. In a leagues tournament that my district held a while ago, we only had 2 fields, resulting in even canceleing a few matches, and things would have moved a LOT faster with 3.