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Tournament types

Tournament bracket formats will vary from tournament to tournament based on the number of teams playing, the number of divisions playing, and whether the tournament is single or double elimination.

• The 2021 and 2022 summer leagues had two divisions of eight teams in each division, playing a single elimination tournament
• The 2021 fall league had two divisions of seven teams in each division, playing a single elimination tournament
• The 2023 fall league had one division of 13 teams. Each tournament also had or did not have a Bye round.
• The World Wide Web has plenty of examples of single and multiple division brackets with different team counts in each division
• As a best practice, a tournament schedule should be prepared and be approved by the board at the same time as the regular season schedule
• Lastly, the regular season and tournament bracket needs to be developed by the Director of Scheduling, but approved by the board.

Create the tournament bracket and csv files

Each scheduler will find a way to develop the tournament schedule that fits their capabilities. Pre-2023 fall tournaments used complex Excel spreadsheets. Starting with the 2023 fall tournament, a much simpler Excel spreadsheet was used, where the bracket was manually updated, BUT the worksheet for each day’s csv file was somewhat automatically populated from the bracket. There are two main manual parts to creating the worksheets used to create the csv files.

1. Determining which team is the home team. The csv tab populates the two teams for a given game, but you need to determine which is the home team.
2. Teams not playing, either through a skipped round or by being eliminated, must have an entry in the csv worksheet. All Bye games are represented with “Bye” as the home team, any field can be chosen, and provide an unusual game time, such as 10:00 pm.

Prepare the bracket for upload to the website

The bracket must be in jpg format in order to upload to the website. You may find a better way, but one tried and true way is to do this:

1. From Excel, “print” the bracket as a pdf. Make sure to set the print area to only print the bracket. You will be asked where to save the resulting pdf.
2. There are a variety of websites/tools that can convert pdf to jpg.
   1. https://pdf2jpg.net/
   2. This website is free.
      1. Choose a PDF file – click on the button, navigate to the folder with the pdf, click open
      2. Convert PDF to JPG – this generates the jpg
      3. Download – Click the Download button, which puts the jpg into your Downloads folder. Note that the filename has “-page-001” appended or similar, so rename the file without that added. You can leave the file there to upload or move the file to another folder.

Upload the bracket jpg

This is best left to a website person for now, so email the jpg to dsanderson.iv@gmail.com. The process involves deleting the previous file from the Media folder, uploading the document to the website Media folder, ensuring that the file is correctly there, and updating the main page to show the new bracket. Note that your browser (e.g., Chrome) may have the old bracket in the cache, so it may not show the updated bracket. In that case, try another browser or device (e.g., phone, tablet).

Create the csv for upload to the database

Once the tournament schedule is ready for upload as a csv

1. In the example, where the bracket and csv worksheets are in Excel, save the csv worksheet for the needed date. In Excel:
   1. Save the spreadsheet
   2. Select the csv worksheet
   3. Double check the contents
      1. Correct home/visitor pairing
      2. Correct field, date, time for each game
      3. All teams accounted for, either playing or with a Bye
   4. Saving the worksheet as a csv will rename the Excel document, which is why the first step to save the Excel document is important. File->Save a Copy as a csv file. Name the file something like “yyyy mm dd”, since there will likely be at least three csv files for each season.
   5. You should get an Excel warning about the selected file type [csv] does not support workbooks that contain multiple sheets. Click OK to save just the active sheet. Note that the spreadsheet now has a new name. Close Excel and you’ll get a question asking you to save the csv document. Click Don’t Save, because it has already been saved. If you want to open the spreadsheet again, ensure that you open the .xlsx file.
   6. At this point, I open the csv in a text editor (e.g., Notepad, Notepad++). I use the text editor to remove any extra blank lines in the csv. The upload step will give a warning on the blank lines, so the blank lines can remain, but as best practice and to make a cleaner upload, you can remove the blank lines.
2. Upload the csv
   1. On the website, select Super User->Upload Tourney Schedule
   2. Click Choose File, navigate to the file
   3. Press Submit. Each line in the schedule will produce multiple debug lines, showing success or failure of each insert. Carefully read them, looking for errors.
   4. If the uploaded games are for the current week, the games should immediately be seen on the NSS home webpage. If the games are for the following week, the games will be seen on either Saturday or Sunday.
Scheduling mistakes cannot be corrected by creating a new csv and uploading it again. Instead, contact the webmaster to have mistakes manually corrected.