For tournament directors
One record from the first entry to the last payout. You open registration, shape the format, build the day, staff it, publish it, run it, and close the payroll — without reassembling any of it from a spreadsheet, a printout, and four message threads.
Start from last season
Weeks before entries open
Nothing about the tournament you ran last spring should have to be typed again. The structure, the venues, the courts, and the contacts are already yours — the new event starts from them instead of from a blank page.
Clone a prior tournament and shift its end date, structure, and blackouts together, or start from a saved template with contest copying optional. Copy a division’s structure, duplicate a round, or create several divisions at once with the settings carried across.
Sites and their courts live in an organization-level catalog with addresses and notes, importable and reorderable, pulled into a tournament rather than rebuilt for each one. A badge tells you which venues are org-managed and which belong to this event only.
Coach, director, and captain contacts belong to the organization, with derived and custom tags, known-contact autocomplete, and a Contacts panel you can mass-select, bulk-email, and bulk-tag from — your selection preserved as you filter.
Work a setup readiness checklist while the event is still a draft, and pull a staff roster across from another tournament in the same organization — a matching name updates in place instead of duplicating.
The second event you run costs a fraction of the first one.
Entries and fees
Registration is open
Registration is where a tournament acquires its field, its contacts, and its fee picture. Taking all three at once is what stops the re-keying later — and what makes a schedule change reach the right inbox in March.
Fees are a record, not a transaction. WNY Athletics calculates what a team owes and tracks what you collected; it does not process card payments, and money never moves through the platform.
A team registers itself, or a club director enters several teams together with shared contacts and a per-team division, name, and code. Every entry ends in a printable confirmation.
Each team carries its own coach, director, captain, and other contacts. That is who a schedule change reaches later, and who the check-in desk asks for.
The USAV or AAU team code can be hidden, optional, or required — per tournament, not per registrar.
Each division sets its own open and close times and its own fee per window, with an optional tournament-level late surcharge, and a division can close registration on its own. The division fee is authoritative, so a free division is free.
Entry fees are calculated, balances and payment status are tracked, and payments, voids, and refunds are recorded by an admin as they happen.
Import teams, staff, and rosters with paste mode, a dry run, and an editable preview — nothing is written until the preview looks right.
The field, the contacts, and the fee picture are in place before you touch the schedule.
Format and advancement
Shaping the event
Most tools model a clean bracket. Real events have partial pools, day-two reseeding, crossovers, consolation minimums, and a challenge match somebody promised in January. Those are first-class here, not workarounds.
Format presets from team count, per-group scoring formats, and partial pool round robins set by matches per team when a full round robin will not fit the day.
Quick seed with club·team labels and a wide preview, and day-two pool seeding drawn from the previous round’s standings.
A crossover is a parent group plus two linked child pools, with contests generated from the parent so every match crosses the boundary. Challenge matches are first-class flow-chart groups with Winner and Loser advancement.
Whole-division advancement with crossover sources, a bracket shape preview with live slot, bye, and match counts, and minimum-contest consolation.
Previewing or applying advancement rules counts the first-round and potential second-round same-pool rematches your destination brackets would create. It reports the risk and changes nothing — the call stays yours.
A team already seated in another group this round is labelled with where it sits, and saving offers three outs: cancel, leave it in both, or move it here and regenerate the vacated group. The same team twice inside one pool is refused outright.
Regenerating a group that already has contests names the contests that are scheduled or staffed and the conflicts the change would create. Matchups that survive keep their court, date, and time, and contest ids stay stable so results and staff assignments survive.
The format is settled — and reusable — before a single court time is assigned.
The court plan
Building the day
Scheduling is where most tournament software stops being helpful: it will hold your times, but it will not tell you the plan is impossible. This one refuses the moves that break the rules and flags the ones that only look uncomfortable — and it is explicit about which is which.
Choose dates, courts, and a wave pattern, then preview every placement. Any group the builder could not place is listed with the reason.
A pool offers a court chip for every court count it can use, with the configured one marked preferred. The drag preview draws one box per planned contest, so lunch and blackout gaps are visible before the drop and conflicting boxes turn red. The layout commits in one batch.
Format maps cover pools of two to eight teams across one to four courts. Each map carries its work-team assignment and court preference — including the standard six- and seven-team work orders — and realigns when the court format changes.
Court and blackout overlaps, the day window, the lunch band — treated as a court conflict — and warmup and transition gaps all block a placement, and a cascade that would push play across a blackout is refused. A bracket stage dragged ahead of its feeder is refused too.
Minimum rest between a team’s obligations is checked and shown as a warning on the block and in the auto-build preview — it does not stop the placement, because sometimes the short turnaround is the right call. Treat a rest warning as a question, not a rejection.
A server-side recheck finds court and blackout overlaps and team double-books scored by role: two playing assignments at once is high severity, a play-versus-work collision medium, two work duties low.
When another device writes the schedule, a “Schedule updated elsewhere” modal offers Refresh schedule or Keep editing and says plainly that continuing may overwrite the other editor’s changes. The check interval is yours to set, and your own saves never prompt.
Delay or postpone, swap two contests in one batch, nudge a start with the arrow keys, filter the board to a single team, and work across days with multi-day move, copy-day layout, and an all-days occupancy strip. Undo covers structure deletes and schedule edits.
The conflict surfaces at your desk instead of at court six.
Officials
Before you publish anything
Officials are the part of a tournament that runs on text messages and memory. Here they answer for themselves, from their own link, before you assign anybody — and what they said is what the assignment wizard works from.
Publishing notifies; it does not extract a commitment. An assignment stays live whether the official accepts, declines, or never answers.
A mass availability request email carries merge tags for the tournament, the dates, and each official’s own self-service link. There is no duplicate guard — sending twice sends twice.
Each official opens a personal link and answers day by day: available all day, unavailable, or partially available with one or more start-and-end windows. The roster shows, per person, whether availability is complete, partial, or not submitted.
Unconfirmed, unavailable, and out-of-window days are a hard exclusion from automatic assignment. You can still assign someone by hand — the exclusion shapes the proposal, it does not overrule you.
Pick the contests, the roles, and the pool of officials, and preview a contest-by-role assignment before anything is written. The preview endpoint writes nothing; Confirm or Discard still governs whether it saves.
Max consecutive assignments and a required break after them are always hard. Max sequential contests on the same court and a team-repeat lookback switch between hard — disallow the candidate — and soft, which only deprioritizes them.
Officials are split into available and unavailable by time overlap, both among the contests you are assigning and against their assignments elsewhere in the tournament, with the conflicting match named.
Select contests and publish or unpublish them, cascading to every filled role slot. Publishing offers to email the officials their work, and their accept or decline comes back onto the assignment grid.
You staff the event from what people actually told you, not from what you remember them saying.
Publish and notify
Telling everyone
A schedule change is only half done when the schedule is right. You see what moved, who it affects, and the exact message — before anything sends.
Publishing gates the public schedule and snapshots contest times and courts. The next republish shows a diff of exactly what changed, so the update you describe matches the change you actually made.
A schedule change generates a notification scoped to the teams and staff it touches — not a blast to the whole event.
The send preview lists the recipients and shows the exact email. Contacts that would be skipped are reconciled and shown, and you can choose recipients selectively.
Each audience has its own send, so a message to officials never lands in a coach’s inbox by accident.
Text messaging is per-deployment. Where it is not configured it simply does not send, and the email path is unaffected.
Post a dismissible banner at info, warning, or urgent level to everyone watching, without emailing anybody.
One change produces one message, aimed at the people who need it.
Game day
Doors open
On the day, the questions arrive faster than the answers. The check-in desk, the master schedule, the scoreboard, and the public pages all read from the same record, so the answer is the same wherever it is asked.
Check teams in, see what has already been checked in, and add, edit, or remove a team’s contacts from the desk or the team drawer while the coach is standing there.
A scorekeeper opens one contest with a short per-contest key. No account of any kind, and that key opens that match and nothing else — a wrong or other-contest key is refused outright rather than falling back to whoever is signed in on the device.
Submit-final verifies with a staff PIN and pushes the result into standings and brackets, so a result does not need a second data-entry pass to move the tournament forward.
The court monitor shows now and next, one card per court location, with a denser kiosk layout, a clock, and auto-refresh for the front desk.
Print the court-day schedule from the schedule toolbar, a staff day card from an official’s schedule, a coach packet from the site drawer, and score sheets from the assignment rows.
Team lifecycle statuses and bulk team actions let you withdraw an entry, rebuild the affected group, and republish with a diff of exactly what moved.
Routine answers stop needing a director, so the exceptions get your full attention.
Closeout
After the final whistle
The last whistle should close the event, not open a second one. Standings, results, and the path each team took are already the record — what is left is paying people and handing your board a file.
Two different things share the word “payment,” so this page keeps them apart. Staff payroll is real: amounts, check numbers, memos, exports, and voids are recorded here. Entry fees are records only — what a team owes, and what you collected.
Per-official rates by contest type — two sets, best-of-three, challenge — plus daily and event minimums, rolled up into earned, issued, and owed. Apply rates to a whole selection in one pass.
Pay out in bulk with per-person amounts, check numbers, and memos, and export the run. A voided row stays in place rather than disappearing.
Score corrections, match moves, and archives are written to a searchable activity table with before-and-after diffs.
CSV export on every admin list, plus the payroll export, so your board’s spreadsheet is a download rather than a retyping job.
An archived tournament can be restored, and a stable public link keeps resolving after a rename — the link you shared in March still works in June.
Clone and re-date the event, save it as a template, and keep the organization’s contacts, venues, and courts.
The event closes with the pay run done and the record intact.
The owner documentation
The help centre carries the owner chain end to end — twelve articles, in roughly the order an event meets them, each one the long version of a section on this page.
One request, read by a person
WNY Athletics is set up for you rather than signed up for — we provision your organization with you, so your divisions, courts, and staff are right before the first event. Tell us what you run, and a person reads it.