Continental Crown...

Wow my brain is fried. I was doing the score sheets for Mat I in the Continental Crown. There were over 100+ matches on the mat and it all went smoothly.

Actually it went rather smooth, and the action kept on flowing. The whole table was doing great, especially with the scoring, texas match card wrangling and the runners. I was glad Dave was there to double up and recheck my work, as it's very important to do so. Especially with people crowding around seeing who was dong what.

At one point we were down to 3 people in the table due to different schedules, with just a score board operator, texas match card handler and myself with the draw sheets.

It was all rather good with the Texas Match Cards, I like that as it makes things simpler. The score sheet was rather simple, after awhile it was either blue or white. It was rather clear and the matches moved fast enough that you had to be rather quick. Over all, even though there were a 103 matches on my mat, I basically saw maybe a dozen of those matches. I know it's hard to believe even though I was in front of the matches, but trying to figure out who will be fighting who, calculating scores on the fly, and ensuring everything was accurate was quite important.

Round robin pools are the hardest as you have to calculate scores based on wins and quality of wins. You also have to do the calculations by hand and ensure accuracy. Looking at it now, yes, it's rather simple math, but things get blurry, when you have parents, coaches, referees asking you what the score is, who is fighting next and so on. The matches moves by so fast, that you have to keep people on deck and everything on track. There were also scratches and forfeits.

Being an Elite "E" level tournament, had to keep everything very accurate to ensure everyone is on track.

The double elimination one is much easier to keep track of, as person x goes hear and person y goes there. Winner goes here, loser goes there, and if loser loses twice, he's eliminated.

At the end everything went smooth. I like the tournaments with the Texas Match Cards as a fighter as everything is rather definite, you know you have match 53 and you're blue, afterwards you have match 58 white. So you know you have to be in your blue gi and then change to your white one afterwards. As a scorer, I like the Texas Match Card as it keeps a record of your wins or losses, as well as you can set up who is fighting who on the table and know who is up next. You also know that if an athlete gives you his card that he is checked in, knows when his fight is and which color he is. It's a lot more work on the prep end, but makes things so much smoother.

The funny thing is you start recognizing people all around. It's a small small world. The referees, the parents, the athletes, the volunteers. Familiar faces all around. It was a fun tournament. At the end of the night, I was tired. I was up early, up late last night and did scoring all day. When I came home, I crashed hard.

Anyways, I'm still hobbling a bit, but my knee is getting much better. I could do some things, but I think I can come to practice next week if I take it easy. All this sitting around makes me antsy. Looking forward to some good practices next week.