Running a Tournament on UltiHQ

A guide for Tournament Directors — from "I have a date and a park" to results published. Fifteen minutes to read; most of it you'll never need, because the product does the remembering. <!-- REVIEWER NOTE (delete before merge): drafted from specs per #422's verification rule. Screen-level details (button names, menu locations) are marked ⚠️ VERIFY and need one pass against the running app. Sections marked COMING describe committed but unshipped work and render hidden until their features land. -->

Before you start

You need three things:

1. A team count (or a realistic guess — you can adjust until you publish)
2. Your fields — how many, and their names
3. Your time window — first pull to hard stop, each day

That's it. You do not need to know tournament formats. That's our job.

Creating your tournament

Create a competition, add your division(s), and set the basics: dates, location, fields. Your event stays in draft — invisible to the public — until you publish it, so seed, argue, and rearrange freely. Nothing leaks while you work.

Fields are named once and reused everywhere — schedules, live views, players' phones. Rename a field and every game on it updates instantly, because games point at the field rather than copying its name.

Choosing a format

Tell the wizard your team count, days, and how many teams advance (for standalone tournaments, "advance" just means how precisely you want final places settled). It answers with a recommended format and alternates, each showing:

• The structure — "two pools of five, then an eight-team bracket, four advance"
• A USAU label where the structure matches the USAU Formats Manual —

"Format 10.3" means this is *the* format the manual prescribes, the one sectional coordinators are required to use. If you're running a sanctioned event, pick the labeled one and you're compliant by construction

• A feasibility verdict — fits / tight / doesn't fit your fields and time

window, with the limiting factor named ("needs 7 rounds; your window fits 6"). Options that don't fit are shown disabled with the reason — never hidden — so you can see what adding a field or an hour would buy you

You can ignore all of it. Manual configuration is always available: build your own pools, pick your own bracket, set your own advancement. The recommendation is a default, not a decision.

Where we differ from the USAU manual

Transcribing the manual's brackets, we found a handful of misprints in the document itself — games lettered wrong, one table misprinted. Every place we differ is published on the manual departures page, with the evidence, so you can check our reasoning rather than trust it. ⚠️ VERIFY in-app location of the departures page link.

Seeding

Seeding is yours — drag teams into order. If suggestions are available for your event (club teams with ranking data or platform history), a suggest option can pre-fill an order which you then adjust and approve; nothing is ever seeded for you. ⚠️ VERIFY current suggestion sources exposed in UI.

Two manual rules the engine enforces so you don't have to remember them: pool-play rematches are avoided in bracket placement where the manual allows opponent swaps, and byes always favor the higher seed.

The schedule

Generate the schedule with one action. The engine places every game into your fields × time grid, validating as it goes: no team plays twice at once, no field double-booked, bracket games never scheduled before the games that feed them, rest windows respected, and no team parked on the far field all day.

Then edit anything. Drag games between slots — validation runs live and tells you specifically what an edit would break before it breaks. Generation is a starting point, not a cage.

Publish when ready. Players see schedules on their phones — including offline at fields with no signal — and every change you make after publishing reaches them automatically. No reposting PDFs, no version-three-final-FINAL.

Game day

The live control panel is your command post; captains are your data entry.

• Scores: captains report from the sideline; agreements post instantly,

conflicts come to you — and only conflicts. Standings, tiebreaks, and bracket advancement cascade automatically the moment a score lands

• Spirit: collected per game, tallied per the event's sanctioning rules
• Delays: when weather hits, delay or postpone from the panel — affected

players are notified without you texting anyone. ⚠️ VERIFY current delay controls scope

• Tiebreaks: the full USAU tie-breaker cascade (rules 2–9, with the

regrouping rule most software skips) runs automatically. When a tie is genuinely unbreakable, it comes to you — and only then

Your phone works at the fields even when the internet doesn't. So do your players'. That's not luck; it's built for the captive-portal WiFi and dead zones every tournament venue has.

After the final

Final placements resolve from the format automatically — including the manual's placement semantics (which games decide which places, which placement games are skippable under USAU's forfeit rules).

Next year, don't rebuild: roll the event over. Fields, settings, and structure carry forward; you update dates and go.

When something goes wrong

• A score was entered wrong: correct it; standings and brackets re-cascade
• A team no-shows: the manual's allowable-forfeit rules are built in
• You're stuck: every screen's help links land in this guide's matching section

*UltiHQ runs the formats in the USAU Tournament Formats Manual as printed, except where the printing is provably wrong — see the departures page. If you find a format we handle incorrectly, we want to know more than you want to tell us.*