How to Organise Your Own Tennis Tournament

Drawing Up a Tournament Schedule

The Roland Garros Grand Slam of 2011 has just produced a fascinating result and I'm wondering whether it is the first time this has happened in a major tennis tournament. 

The four men at the top of the current rankings are also the last four players left in the men's singles competition in Roland Garros.
N°1 Nadal will play N°4 Andy Murray while N°2 Djokovic plays the N°3 Roger Federer..! That itself is the classic way to organise a draw for four top seeded players.

As this seems to be a rare event, I took the opportunity to write a post about how a tennis tournament is drawn up and played out.

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If you find yourself for some reason required to help in the running of a tennis tournament, and you're not sure how to manage a draw, don't despair. Even without the aid of a tournament data management software, you can still draw up a competition simply by organising a list of players so that you have the most rewarding outcome for the tournament as well as for the competitors.

A classical knock out tennis competition can be organised where you draw up a schedule for 8, 16, 32, 64, or 128 players in a tennis tournament.


Managing with uneven numbers of competitors.

If you find that your tournament has only 7 registered participants, then you should make a draw for 8 competitors. One of the players has to be placed on bye in the first round. 

Not all tennis clubs carry out regular player rankings. Ranking your players means that you can have seeded players.

If 25 players register for a tournament, you would have to make up a draw for 32 players. You would place 7 of the top seeds on bye and after the first round where 9 matches are actually played, 9 victors would emerge. Together with your 7 seeded players who were on bye, you would now have a second round comprising 16 competitors. All remaining matches would now be occupied by competitors. This way of organising players should apply no matter how many people or children you have entering your competition.

Just remember that 26 or 28 players entering a competition is also seen as an uneven number for a tennis tournament draw. So you would still have to create a draw for 32. Where you have 28 competitors, you chart your first 16 matches by placing your four top seeds at the top and bottom of both halves of the draw. This means that the top seed becomes player number 1 on the draw, second seed becomes player number 32, the number 3 seed is player number 16 and the number four seed is player number 17. If you have 28 players you have four byes because there will be no players numbered 2, 15, 18, and 31.

On a 32 player competition list, players 1 to 16 comprise the top half of the draw and players 17 to 32 make up the bottom half of the draw. 

Let's walk a bit through the Roland Garros draw for 2011 here, just to see how the seeded players were placed on the draw at the start of the competition.

Roland Garros Men's Singles Competition Draw - 2011

128 men entered the competition in the first round. The big tournaments of course employ computer software that use the data from the players rankings to create the competition draws. But the usual way to understand and chart a competition draw is to place the top seed, in this case Nadal at the top of the draw and the second seed Djokovic at the bottom of the lower half of the draw. 

One way to see it is that two competitions are drawn up with 64 players in each half of the tournament.

If the fourth seed, in this case Andy Murray enters the competition he becomes inserted into the bottom of the top half of the draw. If there are other seeds around, the computer software will recalculate and place them somewhere else in that part of the draw. In this tournament, 3rd seed Roger Federer became placed at the top of the bottom half of the draw. Had Federer and Djokovic both have not turned up for any reason, then Murray as the second highest seed would have needed to be placed at the bottom of the lower half of the competition thus becoming listed as player 128 in the draw.

64 matches were played in the first round of the tournament and 64 players advanced into the second round.

Distributing your seeded players evenly over the draw means that you can hope to avoid situations where, the top players meet each other too early and you end up watching the finals at the beginning of the competition. This is not really good for a dramatic build up of the tournament towards a true grand finale.

Of the 32 men that win in the second round, Nadal and Murray are advancing in the top half of the draw while Federer and Djokovic are among 16 men on the bottom half of the draw that have advanced as second round winners.

After the third round, 16 players advance. Soderling who is ranked N°5, and Troicki ranked N°15 were among the 4 seeded players left in the top half of the draw.

In the four matches left at the bottom half of the draw, three battles were to be fought out between 6 seeded players and only one was to be played between two unseeded players. That was in the match between Montanes and Fognini. Fognini withdrew after winning thus giving Djokovic a walkover into the semi finals where he was to be joined by Federer who still had to beat Monfils.

Back at the top half of the draw, Nadal had beaten Soderling and Murray had defeated Chela.

This year we are left with that incredible result. A semi finals draw where the four top seeds play each other at the end of the tournament.

In terms of the technical details of the draw itself, only at the very last match of the tournament do the two  halves of the draw finally come together for the grand slam title.

It's Thursday night. The eve of the men's singles semi finals in Paris. Which two of the 4 top men in current rankings will advance to play in the grand finale and which one will go on to win the tournament, earn 2000 ranking points and take home the prize money of €1,200,000.00?

Here is the draw of the French Open of 2011.