2023 Aurora Fall Open Tournament Report

On November 25th and 26th, 2023 we held our first USATT sanctioned tournament in since winter of 2020. All 96 spots were filled on Friday the week before the tournament, exactly 62 days after we started advertising it.

I want to thank our sponsors Paddle Palace who provided us with 6 dozen 3 star Nittaku balls, 4 of which waited 3 years to be played since we had to cancel the 2020 Aurora Spring Open due to Covid-19. This was also the first time we had the opportunity to play on 12 new Donic tables which park district bought from Paddle Palace. See belowe what the setup looked like.

I would also like to thank the Fox Valley Park District which hosted our tournament at the Eola Community Center. We have fantastic staff at this location so I would like to thank those who worked with us to make this tournament a success especially Stephane C. and Deonta and several other staff members from the evening shift whose names I didn’t get.

The challenge in this tournament was that we were using a brand new website to register players (https://www.ttaurora.com). After years of relying on well known and loved OmniPong website, I took it upon myself to create a new website which addressed all my complaints about the OmniPong and made it usable on the smartphone.

Many bugs were discovered during the registration period and improvements were introduced to make the onboarding and registration process easier to complete and less error prone. I would like to thank all of you who took the time to contact me and complain about the problems you encountered. Your feedback helped me make the website better.

Setup and Take Down

We were allowed to start setup on Friday evening at 6 pm. Setup was performed by Swavek Lorenc and Miroslaw Lepa with some help of park district staff. Taking out the tables 12 tables out of storage, rolling out the rack with 100 barriers and setting up tables for control desk and sales desk took about 20 minutes. Measuring courts and marking table positions took another 25 minutes. Setting up tables and nets including net measurements took 25 minutes. Taking the barriers off the rack and positioning them another 25 minutes. Washing the tables, attaching numbers another 45 minutes. We were completely done at 8:45 pm, just 15 minutes before closing of the venue.

Takedown started around 2 pm since many groups were finished around this time. The group which took the longest time was group #4. They finished around 2:45. With the help of several of tournament participants we were able to take down the tables and barriers quickly and move them into storage literally 5 minutes before the gym needed to be cleared out.

Tournament Operations

The other big unknown about the new website, was whether the online check in and score entry features would work well. Would the website be fast if 12 people were entering scores and the rest of them browsing the website? Would Wi-Fi in the venue work well so control desk laptops could be used to manage various situations that needed our help? During our advertising campaign, one of my main selling points was that we would aim to run paperless tournaments, so this was going to be a big test. But I did have a backup plan. How did the website fare?

Some players forgot their password so initially we had to help them reset it. Then there were the typical questions about which table one is supposed to play on, which was displayed conveniently on the phone. Other players who didn’t bring or own a smartphone, had to rely on their opponents to enter scores. But I saw their opponents show them entered scores proving that they were honest and there were not conflict situations. Some players unintentionally defaulted their opponents instead of entering the score and we had to help them revert to normal score entry. Finally, some didn’t finish entering the score preventing computation of group ranking at the end. We typically had those players come to the control desk to finalize the match.

But there were very few of these situations. Overall we had very positive reviews of the website. Players fairly quickly figured out how to enter scores and once we showed them additional features they were able to use it efficiently. However, I will try to enhance the website to minimize the possibility of these few types of problems from happening again.

The second day operations was also going well in terms of score entry. The only problem was that the player check in status was somehow not persisting. I will need to look into that. Also defaulting players needs to be reworked since we had a couple of unintended defaults which manifested itself in inability to enter additional game scores.

After coming home I used the website to generate the various tournament report files and submitted them to USATT for processing. I hope that if there are any changes needed I can quickly make corrections and submit them so the new ratings are available by Thursday.

Tournament Operations team: L to R. Andrew Moy (umpire), Swavek Lorenc (Referee) and Miroslaw Lepa (Tournament Director).

Results

We had a 8 total of no-shows on both days, most of them due to sickness. Those who participated achieved the following group rankings after playing a total of 283 matches over 2 days.