Seedings
Seedings are the points that rank or 'seed' teams before a tournament. The points are usually earned through previous tournaments and should comparatively reflect the current level or form of each team. Sometimes through injury or for other reasons the seedings may not reflect this accurately and a tournament organiser may then issue a seeding wildcard where they give a team an adjusted seeding.
Example: On a National Tour your countries top team has been not playing due to injury and they come back part way through the national tour to play again. They are the superior team in playing level compared to all other teams but have less points due to not playing. You might award them a seeding wildcard to move them up the rankings which is fairer for everyone as it means a more accurate distribution of the best teams across the pools. Otherwise you may end up with a very strong pool and a much weaker pool and may have 2 of your top teams meeting in the quarterfinals etc.
Serpentine system
Once you have your seedings you can then distribute the teams across the pools. The Serpentine system is a method of distributing seeded teams into pools whereby you “snake” your way along the pools on paper to place the seeds in the pools. This is widely acknowledged as the fairest system for distributing the talent.
Example:
| Pool A | Pool B | Pool C | Pool D |
Seed | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
| 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 |
| 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 16 | 15 | 14 | 13 |
Drawing of lots
This is pretty self explanatory but should only be used if there are no seedings available for some teams. So perhaps you have seeding points for the top 10 teams and then the rest of the teams all have zero points. So you would use the Serpentine system for the 10 seeded teams and then use a drawing of lots to decide the rest. (Unless you have enough knowledge of the other teams/players abilities and feel you can seed them fairly and quickly yourself or as a tournament committee. This can often be done for junior tournaments where you know the players somewhat. After pool play is completed you can always use points ratios to seed teams for playoff rounds so drawing of lots should not be needed beyond the initial pool distribution.
Points ratios
To get the points ratios you add up all the points for and separately add up all the points against and then divide the total points for by the total points against. I.e. 89 points for and 78 points against = 89 / 78 = 1.141. (You probably should always go 3 decimal places to separate all teams.
Set ratios
Sets won divided by sets lost. I.e. 5 sets won and 3 sets lost = 5/3 = 1.667
Comments