An idea for a "tournament" structure for the online semester

[CPiGuy]

I have just had an interesting idea for an opportunity to take advantage of this semester's almost entirely online nature and the accompanying glut of housewritten tournaments that many people have identified as a problem.

It seems to me that, if some small set of teams wanted to arrange regular scrimmages against each other, they could do so for quite little cost and get a formal tournament out of it, assuming they were able to find a housewrite set that none of them would be playing otherwise (which seems quite likely to exist given this season's large number of housewrites).

Basically my suggestion is this: suppose, say, six teams are interested in such an arrangement. They could then arrange with a housewrite to hold a "mirror" that consists of a series of matches once or twice a week on successive packets until they have completed, say, a double round robin. This would cost each team nothing more than the mirror fee for the set (which is almost always less than $20, as far as I know, for high school sets), and they could arrange with coaches or B team players or something to read the rounds.

I haven't thought too hard about this idea -- maybe it's less feasible than I think or people just won't want to do it -- but I haven't seen anyone suggest something like this and I think it's worth considering.

[alexdz]

Several small local events in Missouri are essentially doing exactly this. I'm not actively there anymore so I don't know a lot of details about how it's being organized, but the spirit is the same -- get through several packets over the course of a week or so, a few each night, and crown a winner by the end of the series. In fact, MSHSAA rules even allow such an "extended tournament" to count as a single contest against their limit.