Run your first competition

This is the shortest honest path from a new account to a finished competition. Each step links to the page that covers it properly.

Order matters more than you would expect

The painful thing to change once entries have arrived is the tournament’s structure — age groups, events, weight categories. Changing it afterwards means emailing affected applicants to review their entries. Get it right before you share the link, and the rest is forgiving.

1. Set your organisation up

Your name, your logo and your currency, before anything goes out with your branding on it.

The logo is worth doing first — it appears on your public registration pages and at the top of every automated email your applicants receive.

→ Set up your organisation · Organisation settings

2. Invite the people who will do the work

Decide who reviews entries and who handles money. Roles are how you keep a volunteer from accidentally approving fifty entries.

→ Your team and their roles

3. Create the tournament

Dates, venue, and the structure: disciplines, age groups, the events inside each, and weight categories for Sanda.

Set the age reference date deliberately. It decides which age group each athlete falls into, and it is usually the end of the competition year rather than the day of the event.

→ Tournaments

4. Build the registration form

Attach it to the tournament, then choose what to ask.

The entry fee and the cap on how many entries you will take are set here, on the form, not on the tournament — you choose them at publish time along with the payment methods you will accept.

Ask for less than you think. Every question is a chance for an entry to stall, and anything derived from the date of birth — age group, eligible events, weight category — you do not need to ask for at all.

If you need a document from each athlete, add a file question and say so in What you’ll need on the overview, which is the only warning an applicant gets to have it ready.

→ Registration forms

5. Publish and share the link

Publishing runs you through a wizard that checks the form against the tournament and blocks anything inconsistent. Then you get a link.

Share it however your clubs actually communicate. If you would rather hand out one address that outlives each season, switch on your organisation’s public page and list the form there.

6. Review what comes in

Entries arrive continuously. Approve, reject, or — far more often — reject with Allow the applicant to fix & resubmit, which emails them a link to correct their entry rather than making them start again.

→ Reviewing entries

7. Collect the fees

Which payment methods appear is your choice when you build the form: card, bank transfer, or a payment slip a person checks. A team can pay in one go or split per athlete.

→ Payments and fees

8. Run the day

Print the packs you need before you leave for the venue — the desk will not thank you for relying on the wi-fi there.

→ Results and standings

9. Record the results

Enter scores, finalise each event, and the medal table and club standings build themselves.

Finalising is a deliberate gate: it is what publishes qualification and lets places be offered. Correcting a finalised event needs its own permission.

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The five things first-time organisers get caught by

1. The entry deadline is exact to the minute. An entry arriving at the deadline is refused. Set it to an hour nobody is working.
2. Applicants get no confirmation email. Their only record is the reference number on the success screen. Say so when you share the link.
3. An attachment refused at submit is silent. The applicant sees a normal success screen; you see the entry with the file flagged. Check attachments on entries you care about.
4. Excel and PDF export do not work. CSV is the only export that does.
5. Delete on the published forms list does nothing. It says the form was deleted and the form is still there after a refresh. Unpublish instead.