Running a Tournament – Getting Started

Competition is a fundamental component of any sport structure, adding value to the membership, volunteers and fans. It is one of the primary reasons why people play and continue to play badminton. It is crucial to develop the best players in the World, but also to cater for players all levels to build a larger pool of players, and help players achieve their potential.

For anyone looking to start running a badminton tournament, you will find a general step-by-step guide below to run a fit for purpose tournament.

Guide to running a tournament

Run a BE Circuit Tournament – Getting Started

Badminton England provide the infrastructure for tournament organisers to run tournaments that sit as part of a nation wide circuit. These all follow the same format, to provide players with a consistent tournament offering, as part of national pathway to earn ranking and grading points and progress within the sport. We are proud of a voluntary workforce who deliver these tournaments on our behalf, without whom we would not be able to have develop and deliver our fantastic sport.

BE Circuit tournaments must be sanctioned by us and run according to the Sanctions Terms and Conditions. This also provides you with personal liability insurance, access to TS licence and software linked to BE website, ranking and grading, and discounted shuttles.

If you are interested in running a BE Circuit for the first time, then please find some steps below to help get you started.

Please note, the fee that Visual Reality charge, for a licence to take payments using PayPal, is now €33. This is a small increase that you should include when budgeting for your tournament(s).

Get in touch

Contact us to register your interest, and we will add you to the Tournament Organisers contact list to receive relevant updates.

If you are interested in a mentor to help you run your first tournament then please let us know.

Competition@badmintonengland.co.uk

Circuit Terms and Conditions

All BE Circuit tournaments must abide by the Sanction Terms and Conditions, and run to the format and rules provided for each circuit. This is to ensure that players receive the same experience wherever they enter a circuit tournament, and also provides you with all the necessary tools and information to make running your tournaments easier.

Sanctions fees support the costs of software licences, grading, ranking, compete website and administration.

Download the ‘Sanction Terms and Conditions’ available under ‘Essential Documents’ section below.

Set up a paypal account

You will need to set up your own PayPal business account to take entry fees/refund entry fees, this links automatically with tournament software.

Alternative ways of taking payment are possible, but may take additional time for you as an organiser to manage. If you would like to use another method of taking payments, please talk to us first competition@badmintonengland.co.uk.

Tournament Software

Tournament Software must be used to run BE Circuit Tournaments. This ensures all tournaments are available for players to enter online, view results, and can be included in the player ranking and grading systems.

You can download ‘Badminton Tournament Planner (English version)’ from the Tournament Software website Tournamentsoftware.com in the downloads page.

A licence for the tournament software will be provided to you as part of running a BE Circuit Tournament (this can be shared between multiple individuals who will need to access/use it). The software licence renews annually, so you may need to contact us for a new one at the start of the year if you don’t receive this automatically. Contact competition@badmintonengland.co.uk.

Applying for sanction

Circuit tournaments must be applied for sanction though our online tool.

We need to know who wants to assume this role so we can provide appropriate permissions – contact competition@badmintonengland.co.uk.

To complete your online sanction you will need:

To have all the details of your tournament (detailed in ‘Online Tournament Sanction Application Guide’ in the downloads sections below).
County Sanction before applying to us (if you are not representing the County) to ensure there are no local issues/conflicts with other planned activity. County badminton associations contacts list.
Follow the ‘Online Tournament Sanction Application Guide’ to log-in and submit an application.
Once submitted this will go to Badminton England for approval. You will receive an email informing you if this is approved or otherwise. We mainly review sanction requests to avoid calendar clashes. Once approved, the tournament is published to the Badminton England tournament software website where it will be visible to players. If you don’t hear from them please contact competition@badmintonengland.co.uk.

Publish Tournament Regulations & Entry

Once your application is approved, you can download the tournament into your tournament software (see ‘Approved Sanction Application – Next Steps’ guide).

Add the standard regulations for your circuit tournaments, as provided in the Essential downloads section below, ensuring to make relevant amendments where different options or information needs to be added.

Ensure your paypal payment details are included into the tournament file, if not already done, and then publish your tournament. You will be requested to pay a fee to tournament software for this.

Your tournament is now ready for players to enter online.

Referee

We can provide some registered referee contacts that you may invite to support your tournament. They are also volunteers, so it will be their choice. There does have to be someone acting in the Referee role capacity who is confident with the regulations and rules to make a sensible decision, but it is not mandatory to have a Registered Referee for Silver/Bronze/Tier 4 Circuit tournaments.