Interesting. I've been asked similar questions to this lots of times. Sounds like a good idea for a video or three.

Absolutely. And if you went deep with it (for example had the ability to set up a league with teams, players, matches/games, results, and reports like rosters, schedules, season records, etc) I would be fully willing to pay for a full seminar. But if you don't have time for a seminar, just a quick vid on how to handle a games/results table would be really helpful! Thanks!!

Kerry a good place to start is with what you have now.  

What spread sheets, word docs, note pads do you have to track info on now?
What type of info do you have there?  (Participant info, schedules, equipment, venues, etc.)
What do you like about your current system?  What do you not like? What do you need that you don't currently have?

Much of a database, and how good it is, depends on the preparation you put into it up front.

The making of tables, forms, and reports applies just as well to selling widgets as to recording sporting competition information. The trick is determining the info in a table and how that info is related to other tables.

Scott,

I have been doing this for many years in several sports before I started taking Richard's courses so Access has been a mystery for many years. Given what I have been doing all my life, this knowledge would have been life-transforming for me (not just in sports) but I digress. For nearly 2 decades, I've been a coach and a tournament director for youth wrestling. Our league is huge, but there is not a soul that has any tech knowledge. The most sophisticated things we do are done with Excel. For insurance purposes all coaches must submit a roster with the first and last names and birth date of each kid. That's all that is required. So Fields would be First, Last, DOB and TeamName.

For the season, Coaches are responsible for networking with the rest of the coaches to create their own schedules. Before each meet, bouts are set up by hand on paper based on coaches and their many assistants looking at the rosters and matching kids up by age and weight (weights are obtained each meet before-hand). During the match, scoring is done by hand on a scorecard. That's not as important for a database as the final result. When the bout is over, most coaches do not have the ability to do much in the way of record keeping. If bouts were scored on a scorecard, and they were all kept, those results could be entered into a well designed database, which, at this time is confounding me. For a "bouts" or "matches" table, Fields would have to include two competitors, the weightClass, and some sort of result that also indicates who won.

The end goal would be able to select a teamRoster that would show the W/L record for each competitor, AND the ability to select a competitor and it shows that competitor's chronological list of competitions with their result. A very good and simple example of this done in practice is BoxRec dot com. They have a very simple database that enables users to click on a boxer and it opens up their entire bout history.

Of course a database that can perform this would be able to be used in ANY one-on-one sport (e.g. Tennis, Bowling, Chess) but could easily be expanded or modified to include any sport where two teams compete head-to-head (Basketball, Football, Baseball, etc).

If you wanted to turn this into a seminar, you could take it very far. For instance, you could add to this a system that actually helps "run" certain events. I personally directed over 20 tournaments. I'll briefly explain the torture I went though:

Interested teams would send me an excel file with the roster of kids on their team that were interested in attending my tournament. I would usually get rosters from 10 - 12 teams. I combined them into one giant spreadsheet and sorted by name. This was what I used to collect weigh-in data in the early morning (or sometimes the night before) of the tournament. After weigh-ins were complete, I resorted the spreadsheet by age group, then weight (age group was a calculated field based on their DOB). I then...by HAND...grouped kids in groups of 8 (or 16) starting at the top of the sheet. I would copy the group and drop it into a sheet on excel that would then automatically populate a bracket (8 or 16-man depending on the group size). Now mind you, this was done ONLY to create paper brackets. These brackets were printed and the tournament was conducted completely on paper and pencil. When it was done, records were left on the paper or discarded.

I know that sounds ambitious to create an entire database to handle it, but its still a fun project that I would love to decode one day. The first bug hurdle seems to figuring out how to organize a "games/matches/bouts" table or query. Also, a similar project does NOT have to be this complicated. Just a Bowling League with bowlers who compete on the weekend could have a table of 30 bowlers, set up a schedule, and have some of the interactive features described above. Thanks for any help or direction on this!

Description of photo: Scott In case you were morbidly curious, here is a screenshot of the enormous workbook I created many years ago to help me run events. You can see that positions on the bracket are calculated fields, and each bracket has its own separate worksheet. Print area was set so that when I printed one or all brackets, spectators only saw what I wanted them to see.

I've been wanting to see this for a while.
Then convert it to the web with

Tournaments
- http://www.aropupu.fi/bracket/
  - https://github.com/teijo/jquery-bracket

- http://www.aropupu.fi/group/
  - https://github.com/teijo/jquery-group

Yes Alex. The two are typically stand alone databases (sports "league" and "games/tournaments") but when you stop and think about it, they both, if designed elegantly, help each other and would be greater than the sum of their parts.

After several days of thinking about it, I came up with an idea that might be a solution. But I consider myself a beginner (even though I finished the Expert Level Courses - BTW I will be purchasing Developer Level as soon as I can, but I digress) so I am just thinking out loud here:

Maybe what needs to happen is that you have one table called "ScheduleT" that stores matchups between competitors, and can be set up before the season starts. Then I will create a separate "ResultsT" table. Using that table, I could create a form that allows me to pull matchup data, and assign fields like points scored, or just assign the winner out of the two. Now I'm not sure if the results form should trigger an append Query or if it can be done directly without an append query, but it should also trigger a delete query that deletes matches off the schedule. So any result entered into the results table will delete that match from the schedule so all you are left with are Scheduled matches and results. Now I am starting to wonder if this can be all on the same table? Ugh this shouldn't be this confusing lol. I'll return if I make any progress on this with an update.