How to run a club badminton tournament: a 30-minute checklist

I've run tournaments at three different clubs over six years, and I've made every mistake on this list. The first one took eight hours of prep and ended with me re-typing the result booklet at 11pm on a Sunday night. The most recent one took forty minutes of prep, a calm Saturday, and a printed booklet was in the WhatsApp group before everyone got home.

The difference wasn't experience. It was a checklist.

This is that checklist.

Before you start: the four decisions that shape everything

Before you write a single fixture, decide these four things. Every other decision falls out of these.

1. Format. Round-robin, knockout, or hybrid (groups + knockout)? For 8-32 teams, hybrid is the default — groups guarantee everyone plays multiple matches, knockout makes the day exciting.

2. Team count cap. Be brutal. A 32-team tournament on 4 courts is an 11-hour day with 22 minutes per match. A 24-team tournament on 4 courts is a comfortable 8-hour day with 30 minutes per match. The right cap is the one your court count and time slot can actually serve.

3. Match format. Single 21-point game per match? Best of 3? Cap at 30? The honest answer for most club tournaments is "single 21 with deuce, cap at 30 for round-robin matches; best of 3 for the final only." Anything more elaborate doubles your day.

4. Entry fee. If you skip charging, you'll get 35% no-shows. Even $10 cuts no-shows in half. Plus it pays for shuttles. Charge it through Stripe so you're not chasing people on WhatsApp the week of.

Once these four decisions are locked, everything else is execution.

The 30-day timeline

T-30 days — Set up the entry form

You need: - Categories (Men's Singles, Women's Singles, Men's Doubles, Women's Doubles, Mixed) - Cap per category - Closing date (10 days before the event minimum) - Entry fee + payment link - Player details: name, club, contact, doubles partner if applicable - Skill grade if you're seeding

If you're using BadiTournie, this is a public registration page with Stripe payment built in. If you're using a Google Form, you'll need to manually reconcile payments against your bank export — budget two evenings for this.

T-21 days — Open registration

Promote in: - Your club's WhatsApp group(s) - Local club WhatsApp networks (the captains will share) - Facebook groups - Email list if you have one - Your own social media

Pin the registration link. People will ask for it three times even if you pinned it.

T-14 days — First chase

For everyone who hasn't paid yet, send a polite "spots are filling — payment confirms your place" message. This recovers about 30% of pending entries.

T-10 days — Registration closes

Don't extend it. The day you extend it is the day you lose your evening building the draw.

After closing: 1. Confirm every paid entry with a thank-you email 2. Rejection email to anyone over the cap (if waitlisting them, say so) 3. Build the team list per category

T-7 days — Build the draw

This is where most organisers lose 4-6 hours.

In a spreadsheet world, you're: - Sorting teams by skill grade - Manually distributing into balanced groups - Building a Round-Robin schedule (every team plays every other team in their group) - Allocating courts and times - Hand-checking for back-to-back matches for the same team - Re-typing it all into a printable format

In BadiTournie (or any modern tournament tool), it's: - Paste teams into the category - Click "Generate groups" - Click "Generate fixtures" - Review and publish

The 6 hours becomes 14 minutes. The error rate goes from "I'll find one tomorrow" to zero.

This is the single biggest lever.

T-5 days — Communicate the schedule

Send to every team: - Their group / starting fixture - The court allocation - Approximate start time - Reporting time (15 min before first match) - Venue address + parking info - What to bring (own racquet + spare strings; you supply shuttles) - The walkover policy (forfeit after how many minutes late)

In BadiTournie, the public tournament page does this for you. Just share the link.

T-2 days — Final rehearsal in your head

Walk through tournament day mentally. What if: - The court partition delivery is late? - A team drops out? - Two umpires call in sick? - The shuttle order is short? - The trophy engraver got a name wrong?

Write the contingency for each. Pin it to your event-day sheet.

T-1 day — Final prep

• Print 2 copies of the master draw (laser printers die at the worst times)
• Print court allocation chart, large format, for the wall
• Charge two phones (your scoring device + backup)
• Confirm all umpires + scorers + trophy engraver
• Bag the shuttles by court
• Bring tape (you'll always need tape)

Tournament day — the 19-item checklist

This is the part nobody writes down until something goes wrong. Print it. Use it.

Setup (T-90 minutes before first match)

1. Court partitions installed and locked
2. Umpire chair / scorer table per court
3. Master draw posted on the wall (or live screen if using BadiTournie's court display)
4. Reception desk set up — registration list + check-in materials + pens
5. Signage: where's the toilet, where's the changeroom, where's the tournament desk

Players arriving (T-30 to T-zero)

6. Check-in opens. Mark each player as arrived (or use BadiTournie's QR check-in).
7. First-match teams briefed: court number, opponent, time
8. Scorer briefed for each court (the score format, how to update on the device, what to do if the device dies)
9. Umpires briefed (if separate from scorers)
10. Walkover decision rule announced (e.g., "10 minutes late = forfeit")

During the day

11. Live standings updated after every match (automatic in BadiTournie; manual on a whiteboard otherwise)
12. Scorer phones plugged in or backup chargers available
13. Court allocation sheet updated as matches finish
14. Knockout draw published as soon as group stages complete
15. Lunch / break for volunteers (rotate so the desk is always staffed)

End of day

16. Final match scored, knockout completed
17. Trophy ceremony with photos
18. Result booklet exported (PDF in BadiTournie; manual in spreadsheet world)
19. Booklet shared on every channel: WhatsApp, email, social

If you tick all 19, you go home calm.

The mistakes I've made so you don't have to

Trusting the spreadsheet. Every tournament I ran on Excel had at least one tiebreaker error that I only spotted at the trophy ceremony. The maths is fiddly. Software calculates it automatically and correctly.

Underestimating the warm-up tax. Players want 5 minutes of warm-up per match. Schedule with 30-minute slots, not 22-minute slots, even if 22 is mathematically possible.

Forgetting the umpire's coin. Bring a coin. Always.

Assuming nobody will complain. Someone will. Have a written copy of the rules and the format on hand. Point at it calmly.

Trying to also play. Don't. The tournament director and a competitor are two different jobs. Pick one per event.

Not communicating start times early enough. People will ask in the WhatsApp group at 9pm the night before. The 5-day-out comms is what stops this.

No backup for live scoring. Two phones, two chargers, one whiteboard. Always.

Skipping the post-event recap. Two days after, write what worked and what didn't. Future-you will thank you. (And your successor when you hand off the role will thank you even more.)

How BadiTournie handles all this

Quick honest pitch — this blog is on our marketing site, after all.

BadiTournie is what I built so I could stop running tournaments on Excel. It does:

• Public registration with Stripe payments (T-30 days)
• Auto-generated groups + round-robin fixtures (T-7 days)
• Mobile scorer app — works offline (during the day)
• Live court display for the venue TV (during the day)
• Live public standings (during the day)
• Automatic knockout bracket generation (between group stage and KO)
• One-click PDF result booklet (end of day)
• BWF-correct tiebreakers (PD → H2H → TPS) — automatic

Free 7-day trial, no credit card. After that you can pay per tournament or go monthly for unlimited events — see current pricing.

If you've got an event coming up, give it 20 minutes. Worst case: you go back to Excel.

→ Try BadiTournie free

Sreeju Sreekumar is the founder of BadiTournie, the all-in-one tournament management app for badminton clubs. He knows the pain of running badminton tournaments through Excel all too well. That's why he founded BadiTournie — an all-in-one app that gives badminton clubs a smarter way to manage their tournaments.