Steps to Planning a Ping Pong Tournament on your School Campus

Planning any type of tournament is a lot of work! And I can tell you that by experience! Especially, if you're the person who's in charge of e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g and trying to get everyone involved and happy and make it run successfully. Here are some tips and pointers that I'd came up with that could be useful for anyone who is trying to plan a ping pong tournament of their own on campus.

Steps in making a Ping Pong Tournament:

1. Talk to the officers of the club and members about planning a tournament. What times and dates are better for them? Who's willing to commit and show up for the tournament? Don't forget to fill in with your advisor. They will be a big help in the process!

2. Talk to any offices in charge of events/sporting events on campus. You want to know what you can and can't do before establishing a tournament on campus. The last thing you want is to have your club in deep trouble.

3. Once you got the okay, talk to the officers and the advisor. Setting a meeting would be the best option to sit down and talk about planning the dates and times, setting up the registration, setting up the brackets, and of course, you can't forget the prizes! Another plus for my club is that our advisor is the director of our campus PE facility. Which can be a big help when planning tournaments.

4. Now here's the little things (advertising, registration, etc.) you'll need to do for the big day:

•   Now that you have establish a date & time, make flyers. Post them around your campus, the school's website/Facebook, the TVs
•   Send out a mass email to all of your current members & ask them to get their friends involve! Facebook can help out as well!
•   For those who are not members, make a big poster board with the tournament info and a sign up sheet. Put it somewhere where your ping pong tables are located. For my campus, we have ping pong tables in the Game Room. Throughout the week, go and check the board. You want to add them to your email list to tell them how to register.
•   Set up your registration form! For our club, our advisor took care of that. We had it set up on the school's website and people can just register from there. Registration really makes it easy for when setting up the bracket and knowing how many goodies/prizes to giveaway or food/drink and t-shirts to provide. But do expect a number of people who will register the last minute on the day of the tournament! It always happens!
•   If you're looking to giveaway goodies to your participants, like free fast food coupons, then start talking to places near your campus to see who's willing to help out!
•   Look into your prizes!

5. The night of or whenever you close the registration, start setting up the brackets and the levels. Randomly pick who's going against who. And you might want to make another poster board to display for the day of the tournament and have the list of brackets. So that way the players can see.

6. And of course, have fun during the event! Give out the free goodies/T-shirts/water to the participants. Constantly keep record of those who passed to the next round! Make sure to take pictures and videos so that way you'll have something cool to show with your previous events when recruiting new members.

I hope you found this information useful!  If you have any questions or comments, feel free to always leave me a message! Thanks for reading!