Quote:
Originally Posted by Nemo
The biggest thing you need is a bunch of volunteers.
What type of FTC event do you have in mind? How many teams?
Here's a quick list of some of the big items you need:
Volunteers (key volunteers can be tough to get)
Venue (competition floor + stands, pits, judging areas)
Various tables in the venue (pits + field tables = 30+ tables)
Volunteer food
Concessions
Fields (including practice field)
Field electronics + laptops
Whether this is doable for you depends largely on the volunteer situation. When we were doing qualifier events at our school, we'd have over 50 volunteers for a 20-24 team event. Now we're on league meets, so it's a lower number. Getting enough referees and judges is challenging. Getting an emcee can be challenging. You also need a head FTA, and lead HW+SW inspectors, and you need people who know what they're doing in those roles. Each of those key volunteers needs helpers. Then you need a variety of non-trained positions such as field reset, queuers, pit runner, pit admin, and check-in.
Venues can also a challenge, because basketball seemingly takes over every square inch of gym space for every minute of the basketball season.
We have a lot of volunteers in our area, and hosting the event at the school made a lot of things free or inexpensive. That makes it pretty doable here. The first time anybody hosts an event, it's going to be stressful and a learning experience. But once an event has some momentum, the event capacity goes up for the program in your area, and that's a beautiful thing. Somebody's gotta do it.
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I agree with everything above however one of the key things to remember is that all your volunteers need training.
Field reset, queuers, pit runner, pit admin, and check-in all need a short, 5 minute max, training session to tell then what you expect them to do.
Examples: Queuers need to know where they should bring the teams to queu, Field reset need to know how the field goes together, etc. The event will not run smoothly if these positions have problems. But these people can be trained on the day of.
Your other volunteers, judges, refs, MC's and inspecters all need to be trained before the day of. This means that they can help with the training for the remaining positions.
One of the effective ways to train your volunteers is to have a time for just judges (robot interview), or just refs. Then you can contact the MC and talk with them personally. It is a good idea to have a back up MC especially if you are not going to have a mic, by half way through the day the MC appreciates even a 15 minute voice break.
When you make your even schedule 10 minutes per match with 15 minute gaps between every 4 or 5 matches will mean that you can end on time. The 15 minute gaps will be used when you have field trouble or longer matches. It seems like a lot of time to put in a schedule as non planned but almost every minute of it will be used.
My team had a scrimmage with 10 teams and this is the schedule:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...ldkW Hc#gid=0 . You may copy this schedule but cannot edit it where it is.
We did not do an elimination round or awards through we did do a high five line. So in essence this schedule has only ranking matches and then skips straight to awards.
I hope this helps. Good luck with your scrimmage.