How to Organize a Recreational Volleyball Tournament

Organizing a recreational volleyball tournament requires creating and managing brackets, as well as coordinating players, teams, officials and spectators. Rather than just finding a venue for your tournament and collecting interested teams, consider associating your tournament with a charity and getting sponsorship from local businesses for more community involvement.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

1. Find a venue for the tournament. The venue should have room for at least one regulation size volleyball court, preferably two or more. Gyms at schools, churches and community centers are all good places to start looking.
2. Find materials for the courts, if not provided by the venue. If your venue doesn't come equipped with volleyball nets, try to find some from another source (school or community center). You'll also need tape to mark off the courts, seating for players and spectators and, of course, volleyballs.
3. Advertise your tournament to interested teams. Options for participants may be community recreational teams, school club teams or teams from churches and other religious organizations. Contact existing teams directly and begin to advertise the tournament at least two months in advance to give people time to form teams.
4. Decide if you want to charge a registration fee and who the fee will benefit. If you accrue any costs with the venue, supplies and equipment, you may need to charge a fee just to stage the tournament. If you get services donated, you may want to consider a charity or other cause for the tournament.
5. Decide if your tournament will be for co-ed teams or all-male and all-female teams only. If you anticipate having enough participants, you can make a co-ed division and a single-sex division.
6. Set the date for registration at least one to two weeks in advance of the tournament, so that you can determine if you need to make age divisions.
7. Make sure that you have several qualified and knowledgeable people on hand to referee the games. Officials should have knowledge of the rules of the game and be supplied with a whistle. Have other volunteers keep score. You can teach volunteers how to keep score prior to the tournament.
8. Decide if you want the tournament structure to be single elimination, double elimination or round robin. Which structure you choose depends largely on how many participants you have and how long you want the tournament to be. Consider factors such as age. If you have a number of elderly or very young players, you may want to limit game time.
9. Decide what type of prizes or awards you want to have at the end. If you have local sponsors, they may donate gift certificates or other goods or services that you can offer as prizes.

Tips & Warnings

• Make sure that you have a first aid kit and, at least, one qualified medical worker on hand, or at the very least someone able to administer first aid.