I’ve helped organizing competitions in traditional martial arts and despite them also switching to smoothcomp it often goes wrong.

There’s several reasons why you might have a bad time but please keep in mind that nobody is trying to make you have a bad time.

• Most of the time you’re dealing with volunteers, and especially if it’s the first time they’re helping they’ll fuck up.

• Together with humans being volunteered, much of the material is as well, and even if it’s not your first time helping, it could be the gear you just got that morning is broken or not set up.

• Often the location isn’t available ahead of time since it’s shared with other sports, this eats away a massive chunk of volunteer capital.

• Depending on the comp you might want to or need to accommodate specific clubs. If one club is arriving en masse with 40 youth competitors and their coaches who compete in adults you’re going to delay for them. Especially if they sent out volunteers to help with putting down mats. This will delay everything.

• Smoothcomp randomisation will do weird things from time to time.

• Speaking of smoothcomp: there’s no easy way to get people to train with it. You can’t just run a fictional tournament to train you into using it. Neither as an organiser, nor as a table person. They luckily do have the simplified match scoring app software.

• Small delays snowball. And volunteers are only human. Volunteering for a one day tournament is more tiring than a day of paid work.

So if you want to make it better, please volunteer. There’s never enough people. Last time I helped at one I was throwing mats in a van at night, helping those out of it in the morning. Getting people weighed in, helping with the building of brackets, helping with table administration, mediating between the sport hall caretakers and parents of children who didn’t understand why they couldn’t bring in their drinks and food despite the millions of signs saying they couldn’t. Reminding the trainer’s of kids they couldn’t go to a section of the sport hall where gymnasts were training and who they were bothering. Hoping I could have a chance to coach a couple of friends (I couldn’t), processing match results and helping clean up after. And that was a well staffed event with volunteers. Most do with a lot less. And there still weren’t enough. The other two clubs sending people definitely got preferential treatment when it came to the scheduling though. As that TMA club I’m a part off will get at events they organise and where we will also send out our volunteers.