How to Schedule Tournaments and Create Playoff Brackets

Watching a sports game is always exciting, but watching a tournament creates even more excitement. It’s a great way to encourage your sports fans to come back to your site to check on their favorite team’s progress. It also adds a dose of interactivity to your website as the results of the tournament are updated automatically.

Luckily, scheduling tournaments and creating interactive play-off brackets is easy with SportsPress. In this post, we’ll take a look at what the tournament brackets feature has to offer and how to set up your very first tournament.

What Can You Do With Tournament Brackets?

Tournament brackets is a useful feature in SportsPress that automatically creates events for you for each individual match. You can set up all the details such as dates, teams, and times of matches well in advance and then simply update the results.

As the tournament progresses, each team will be moved on to the next stage or removed from the tournament, depending on the results of the individual match. You can choose between single or double elimination; where you can add up to 64 teams in single elimination or 8 teams in double elimination. The feature also allows you to set up separate brackets for losers and champions.

What’s more, you can insert league tables before the brackets as a handy way to show how each team played before making it into the main stage. That way, all the information can be shown on one page, ensuring your fans have easy access to all the important information they want to see.

How to Create A Tournament Bracket In SportsPress Pro

To get started with tournament scheduling, log in to your dashboard and navigate to
Events > Tournaments. Click Add New button and give your tournament a name.

Enter a description for your tournament and then proceed to enter the details of the matches. You can then choose 2 teams for each event. If you want the actual events to be created automatically, you need to enter the date when the match will be played. Entering a time is completely optional.

Keep in mind that if you plan on streaming the match live on your site or want to encourage fans to show up for the tournament, setting the correct time is a good way to keep them informed.

You can update the results of each match after the event and the winner will automatically be moved to the next stage of the tournament.

It’s worth mentioning that you’ll need to configure the Event Outcome settings under SportsPress Configure to ensure the proper winner is chosen automatically. If you’re using your own outcomes you may need to edit the order they appear so that the topmost outcome which is usually set to win appears higher in the list.

Once you’ve added all the teams and set the dates for the matches, it’s time to fine tune the details. The layout section determines how the results will display on your site.

Below, you can select whether your tournament mode is team vs team or player vs player.

You can select the competition and season that the tournament belongs to which will allow you to narrow down the teams that are competing.

You can also select the number of rounds and teams that are participating in the tournament. Finally, you can display a promotional image of the tournament.

After you’ve entered all the details, click on Publish to save the tournament. When the tournament is over, you can select the winner from the Details section. The winning team will appear at the top of the bracket along with an image of their team logo.

How to Promote Your Tournament

Once you’ve created your tournament, it’s time to promote it. Here are 5 ways to help you generate buzz and ensure your fans are aware of the event.

1. Use Social Media

Social media can be quite effective in promoting your tournament. Aside from promoting it yourself, take advantage of the teams’ social media accounts and post a photo of that announces the beginning of the tournament.

You can also post short teaser videos as the teams are preparing for it and announce each match and stage during the tournament. Encourage team members to use their individual social media accounts to promote the tournament as well for a more personal touch.

2. Send a Newsletter

If you’ve planned your marketing strategy right, you probably have a decent email list of fans that are eager to hear from you. Send them a newsletter before the tournament begins and don’t forget to keep them updated as the teams progress to the next stage.

3. Create Flyers

Offline marketing is still valuable, especially when you’re promoting a physical event. Consider creating promotional flyers and leaving them in local bars, coffee shops, colleges or any other place where you fans like to hang out.

4. Include Your Fans

An excellent way to engage your fans and build buzz is to include them in the event promotion and give them an incentive for promoting it. You can run a contest using a site like Rafflecopter to award the fan (or fans) that share a custom social media update the most and give them a pair of tickets as a prize.

Not only will your fans be excited about the tournament but they will also be more inclined to show up and share it with their friends and family.

5. Run an Ad

Lastly, consider running an ad in your local sports newspaper section or sports magazine. This will allow you to reach the portion of your audience that still prefers to get their news the old-fashioned way and possibly reach an entirely new audience that might turn into loyal fans.

Add Interactivity to Your Site With Tournament Brackets

Tournament brackets will add interactivity to your website because your fans can immediately see the upcoming matches and know who the winning team will compete against next. This encourages users to come back to your site and check on the tournament’s progress and gives them another way to engage with your team, especially if you include them in your promotion strategy.

Use SportsPress Pro to start creating tournaments and don’t forget to download our checklist of 5 steps to plan your tournament.

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