Brackets

For me, the single hardest task of a tournament director is forming the brackets.  In an ideal scenario, a bracket in our format (discussed in a separate post) would consist of 7 teams of the same skill level and within 5-10 years of age from youngest to oldest.  But last year’s tournament showed how unrealistic this scenario is.  We had only four 5.0 teams, two of which were in their 20’s and two of which were 50+.  We also had only one 2.5 team and three 3.0 teams.  In that situation, we merged the younger 5.0 teams with younger 4.5 teams and did the same with the older teams. We also merged the 2.5 and 3.0 teams together.

But last year we had to abide strictly by USAPA bracketing rules as a sanctioned tournament.  We have a little more flexibility this year.  We intend to be guided again by our “competitive and fair” theme.  Our principles will include separating skill level and age groups wherever reasonable.  We are thinking that 50 years of age is an appropriate break point to start the age bracket separation.  In other words, players of 50+ years would be bracketed together and players under 50 would be bracketed together.  This would be subject to further separation if sufficient numbers of similarly-aged teams were to register.

But we also believe that medals should be earned through competitive play.  They should not be won by default because only 1, 2, or 3 teams registered in an individual skill/age bracket.  Therefore, brackets of 4 teams or fewer will be combined with other age or skill levels in order to form a bracket of competitive size.  If your age/skill bracket looks small, I encourage you to recruit other teams to register.

You will note that there are brackets shown on our page on pickleballtournaments.com.  I hesitated to show that information because players tend to lock that into their minds as the final bracket.  The reality is that the system default brackets will only serve as a starting point for our final brackets.  It is highly likely that brackets will be combined or broken up in different ways.  Please rest assured that we will always do so with “competitive and fair” as our guiding principle.  As tournament players ourselves, we understand the importance of that concept.