Managing venues
Your sports hall, your outdoor courts and your clubhouse belong to the club rather than to one tournament. Record them once and use them again every season.
Four steps
There is no address field on a tournament: you pick a venue from your sports club list instead. The first two steps you do once. The last two belong to each new tournament.
- 1
Create the venue
Go to your club settings and add a venue. Give it a name, an address with postcode and town, and a note for yourself if you want one. You can set a timezone per venue; leave it empty and the tournament timezone applies.
- 2
Add what is played on
Inside the venue, add the courts, tables, pitches, boards, lanes or mats. Each one gets a name and a place in the order you want them filled. The planner keeps to that order.
- 3
Say when it can be used
In the availability calendar, set per date from what time to what time the venue is open, and what is shut. A hall open Saturday 09:00 to 22:00 and Sunday 10:00 to 17:00 is two lines.
- 4
Book the courts for your tournament
On the tournament, choose which courts it may use. That is the capacity the planner works with. Book nothing and nothing gets scheduled, which is deliberate: no playing schedule is better than a schedule on courts somebody else has that day.
How your hall sits in PlayTour
One list of your sports club’s venues, and under each venue what it holds.
The venue on top, its courts underneath
Your club keeps one list of venues, and each venue holds the courts, pitches or boards inside it. A hall goes in once and every later tournament picks from the list, instead of you typing the address again.
- Your club’s venues together in one list
- The courts, pitches or boards inside each one
- Entered once, then reused every season
What you record where
Three layers: the venue, the courts inside it, and the hours they can be used. Each layer has its own fields.
The venue
- A name, as you want it to read on the tournament page
- Street, postcode, town and country
- Its own timezone, otherwise the tournament decides
- A note for your own volunteers
- Anybody with a role can look, a manager can change it, an administrator can delete it
- Active or not, so a hall you no longer use drops off the list without taking its history with it
The courts inside it
- A name that is unique within the venue, so never two "Court 1"
- A free label for what it is: court, table, pitch, board, mat or piste
- The order they are filled in
- Active or not, for a court under maintenance
- A note, for example "small hall, no seating"
- One court holds one match at a time, so a hall with a divider is two courts rather than one wide one
The availability
- A start and end time, per date
- Open or shut: a closure takes time out of an opening
- Applies to the whole venue, or to one court
- Every day is entered separately, there is no weekly pattern
- A note on a closure, for example "floor being treated"
- A day with nothing declared has no capacity at all: silence is not consent
- The calendar is replaced as a whole, so you edit the weekend and save it in one go
One example touches all of it: hall open Saturday 09:00 to 22:00, open Sunday 10:00 to 17:00, and court 3 shut on Sunday morning until 13:00. That is three lines.
Questions that come with this
Venues and reuse
Do I create a new venue for every tournament?+
No, and that is why venues belong to the club. You create the hall once and pick it again for each tournament. The courts, their names and their order stay put. While every tournament carried its own address, the same hall could be described twice and the two descriptions could disagree; now the hall holds the address and the tournament points at it.
Does a venue have to be a building?+
No. A park, a start area or a stretch of beach can be a venue. That is how a road race keeps an address without inventing courts it does not have.
We play at another club, not at our own+
Then add that hall as a venue of your own club and put in what you use there. The venue list says where you play, not who owns the building.
Can I delete a venue?+
Only if matches were never scheduled in it. Once they have been, deleting is refused, because the history of everything played there would stop making sense. Make the venue inactive instead: it stops being offered on a new tournament and stays visible.
Can I still swap the venue of a running tournament?+
Only while nobody has entered. After that the venue is fixed, like the dates and the timezone. People entered a tournament at a particular place, and that must not move out from under them. If you do end up playing elsewhere, send an announcement.
Courts and availability
What counts as a court?+
Anything that holds one match at a time: a tennis court, a dartboard, a table tennis table, a pitch, a mat or a swimming lane. PlayTour treats them all identically; the label you add is there so the screen reads properly.
Our hall splits in two with a divider+
Then enter two courts, for example "Hall A" and "Hall B". Each half can then be booked, closed and scheduled on its own. One court with room for two matches does not exist, because the planner could no longer see a double booking on it.
Can I close one court without closing the hall?+
Yes. A closure can name a single court. It is subtracted from the hall opening that covers it, so you never have to rewrite the hall hours.
Can opening hours repeat every week?+
No, every day goes in separately. For a tournament weekend that is two lines, and across a whole season almost every week has an exception anyway.
What happens on a day with no opening hours?+
The planner places nothing there, even if the courts are booked for that day. A court is only usable once the venue is open on that day. If nothing at all has been scheduled, this is usually why.
Booking courts for a tournament
Why do I have to book courts separately?+
Because you rarely have the whole hall. Your club championship takes four of the six courts and leaves two for ordinary members. What you book is what the planner may use, and nothing more.
Can we play at more than one venue?+
Yes. You may book courts from different venues for the same tournament, which is what a town championship across three clubs needs. The playing schedule names the venue beside every match.
Which venue then shows on the tournament page?+
The one you picked on the tournament itself. That is the address entrants see and the one search uses. The courts you book may sit outside it.
Can the court order differ per tournament?+
Yes. The venue has its own order, and each tournament may choose a different one. Useful when you want centre court filled last instead of first.
I cannot un-book a court+
Then matches are already standing on it. Move or reschedule those first. Otherwise the playing schedule would point at capacity the tournament no longer has, and matches people have been told about would quietly shift.
No venue means not findable by town
A tournament without a venue is allowed, because an online chess event is played nowhere. But the town entrants filter on comes from the venue, so leave it empty and your tournament will not appear in a search by town or nearby.
For anything genuinely played somewhere, a venue is not a formality. See how entrants search.
Venues done, now the schedule
With the courts booked and the hours known, the planner can get to work. After that the playing schedule goes out to your entrants.