It is October 23, 2000, as I jot this down. For many years now I have been involved in organizing local and national tournaments in our Gym, and with the help of many others this has generally been considered a success. Over the years we have assembled a large number of notes and now computer programs that may be of some use to the community. Right now I am in the middle of running the annual DC Open, where we typically get about 150 or so players from mostly Region-I of the USAB.

Here’s an outline of the whole process, from registration to post-tournament reporting, in terms of TourneyTools, a suite of programs and scripts to aid in running such a tournament. I hope to flesh this out sometime later, after the tournament no doubt. The notes will be a bit technical, and still incomplete and opaque in places:

1. assume you have a webserver running
2. write a registration form, e.g. using html form. Look at this for one of my recent examples.
3. write a cgi-script that will process the above form by sending a set of keyword=value pairs via an email message. See my example dcopen.c, a small C program that compiles with the apache source-code, but needs their util.c to complete the link.
4. Here is a version written in perl, that we used for the senior nationals: seniors.pl. It contains a few stupid redundant buttons (e.g. number of events, sum/sum1/sum2) which should have been computed from the entered events.
5. manually, or via procmail, place the incoming emails in a special mail folder for further processing. this mailfolder will be the database.
6. Here comes the dirty work: players cannot spell their own name, let alone that of their partner. some don’t even know first from last name (that’s cultural to begin with), they are not consistent in use of upper, lower or use of capitilization. some of it can be programmed, but most not. Basically you will need to edit this database. To allow users to edit their own entry after submission is asking for trouble. An expert needs to do this. A set of scripts (described below) will help identifying these problems.
7. A set of scripts and programs will do most of this checking. For example, it will create a lists of each event with the teams, and in the case of a (mixed) doubles, checking if player A and player B both registered with each other as partner, and encoding errors in the output. In this example you can see how it came raw out of the database.
8. Pairs of teams, where this is possible, are made up, and a complete list of teams is studied by the seeding committee. They will come up with a 1st, and 2nd seed, and depending on the size of the draw, a 3/4rd seed and shadow seeds for the 5th-8th places. The remainder of the players is more-or-less randomly (resolving some geographic conflicts) sprinkled into a (predefined set of points of the) draw. Here you can see the sorted list, I’ve added some comments in the form of lines that start with the # symbol.
9. A program makedraw turns this ranked list into a draw. This is again a simple ASCII file, but now containing the location of the players in this draw. Again, you can comment your files for personal usage. Version 0.8 (march 2002) now correctly implements the IBF rules for placing byes in the draw for any arbitrary size draw using a nice little recursive formulae I happen to empirically derive. See comments in the code.
10. A program drawplot turns a draw into a human readable plot, which can be annotated and filled in during the tournament at the desk. Normally we now keep a laptop/computer at the desk, and as matches have been played, fill them into this ASCII file. Once all the draws have been filled out, drawplot can also compute some simple statistics, such as the number of matches played etc.
11. The drawplot program can also generate a list of all players that lost in the 1st or 2nd round. This has always been the way we create A/B/C/D drop-down events, and can be very rewarding for the players, but is a major time sink for the tournmament desk. Now creating a list is just a snap. The list has only to be sorted by strenght of the players, and fed into makedraw to create the dropped down draw.
12. Another nice idea is the express checkin. Those who pay in advance, give the correct USAB number, and sent in the consent form, will get priority checkin, and receive a red card. All other players need to be processed at registration time before they get the red card. Only red card holders will be allowed access on the courts. The red card contains also their events. It can also be used for other purposes (e.g. a lottery ).
13. Here’s a writeup of some of the background of tournament math, the following two tables are explained in more details in this writeup:

"Badminton is a racquet sport played by either two opposing players (singles) or two opposing pairs (doubles), who take positions on opposite halves of a rectangular court that is divided by a net. Players score points by striking a shuttlecock with their racquet so that it passes over the net and lands in their opponents’ half of the court. A rally ends once the shuttlecock has struck the ground, and each side may only strike the shuttlecock once before it passes over the net."   "The shuttlecock (or shuttle) is a feathered projectile whose unique aerodynamic properties cause it … to decelerate more rapidly than a ball. Shuttlecocks have a much higher top speed, when compared to other racquet sports. Because shuttlecock flight is affected by wind, competitive badminton is best played indoors."

Fremont, CA. (BC) – California Badminton Academy (CBA) celebrated its grand opening on Sunday with a cast of local officials and badminton personalities.

After years of planning and months of labor and preparation, California Badminton Academy has finally opened to the public for badminton and table tennis. CBA is the latest of a explosion of private badminton club that was sprung out in the San Francisco Bay Area.

With a area of over 35,000 sq ft and hosting 18 badminton courts, it is also the largest in the area. CBA is the brainchild of sole owner Rose Lei. Rose was part of the Chinese National Team back in the late 60 and early 70s. She trained and participated alongside many legendary player like Hou Jia Chang and Tang Xinfu.

Rose has the vision of a badminton club that brings badminton players together, fulfilling the club motto of "Strong Mind, Strong Body, Strong Skills, Strong Community." With the help of her family and many friends, she has fulfilled her dream and vision today. I can see the joy in her eyes while i was congratulating her. Her baby was born today.

During the opening ceremony, CBA invited many government officials and badminton personalities including the planning commission members, the warehouse landlord, her team of coaches Radu and Yee, as well as well known US badminton coaches like Andy Gouw and Dick Ng. However, the guest of honor for the ceremony is the legendary Hou Jia Chang. Very few people in the badminton community have not heard of Hou Jia Chang, but yet, very few has actually met him.

Hou was part of the Chinese team back in the 70s and after that, he retired and stayed in the national team as coach. His students includes other more recent legend such as Yang Yang, Han Jian, Zhao Jinhua and Xiong Guo Bao. He retired in 1993 and later moved to the US and now resides in Mississippi.

I talked to Hou briefly and found that he is a very humbled and soft spoken man. He was never boastful despite his extraordinary history and achievement in the sport of badminton. He is passionate about badminton after all these years. In the next few days, he will be conducting clinics for local badminton players in order to meet badminton players young and old.

I played a few rounds of badminton after the ceremony and managed to catch Hou conducting this evening’s clinic. At the age of 67, he no longer actively play badminton. His body simply cannot keep up anymore. However, he was very animated during the coaching session. Full of expressions and full of energy. Twisting and jumping and gesturing and posturing to show the young students the way to play badminton. It was as if a boxer stepping into the ring, stepping into the badminton court turned on his passion and energy.

To think that back 20 yrs ago, the same Hou Jia Chang who probably used the same posture and gesture to train players like Yang Yang and Zhao Jinhua in the China national team, it was quite a sight and something to ponder about.

It was a truly humbling day today to have met the legend. For a young badminton fanatic like myself who was still in diapers when Hou conquered the world, this is a lifetime opportunity.

I arrived at CBA at 2pm and I was there for a full 6 hours. I left feeling very happy for Rose to have fulfilled her dream, and I left feeling happy to have met a badminton legend. I wish Rose and CBA the best of luck in their journey and we look forward to see the next generation of professional players coming out of CBA soon.