From an empty screen to a finished tournament

Describe the event once

Dates, timezone, the venues and the fields — including the ones you only have until noon. Then the divisions: age group, entry fee, how long a game is, how many innings, the run cap and the run rule. Six divisions that share rules are set once and applied to all of them.

Everything after this reads from here, so a field you forgot to add is the one thing that will bite — and the setup checklist tells you before the schedule does.

Take entries

Your tournament gets a public page with a division list, entry fees and a button. Teams enter online. Open entry, request-and-approve, or invite only — and a cap per division that is never exceeded, with a waiting list behind it.

Entry fees go to your own Stripe account, or straight to you by Venmo, PayPal or Cash App. TournaPilot never holds a cent of it.

Choose a format that actually fits

This is the decision the whole weekend hangs on, and it is usually made from memory. The format recommender takes the teams you have, the fields you have and the hours you have, and works out which shapes finish in time — how many games each costs, how many each team plays, how long the day runs, and how likely each is to send the best team home with the trophy.

It will tell you when nothing fits. That is worth knowing on Tuesday rather than at 3pm on Saturday.

Build the pools

Teams are spread across pools at random but balanced by strength, so the two best teams do not land in the same group and knock each other out before the bracket. Then drag whoever you want wherever you want them — you have the final say, the engine just does its best first.

Generate the schedule

One press. Field availability, which divisions play where, rest between a team’s games, back-to-back preferences, keeping a division on one field, championship fields, the gap before bracket play and a hard finish time — all of it at once. Bracket games are placed as placeholders before anybody has qualified, because they need slots too.

Drag a game somewhere else and the editor checks the same rules the generator did. Lock the ones that must not move and regenerate the rest.

Run the day

The Today screen is a clock, on a phone, in one hand. Enter a score — the final, the score plus innings, or a full box score, whichever the division uses. Push everything back twenty minutes when it rains. Call a game off when you have to.

Save it to your home screen and it opens full screen on the tournament you were last in.

Let it finish itself

Scores move the standings. The standings apply your tiebreakers in your order and say which rule actually separated two teams. The standings seed the bracket. The bracket advances itself, including the losers side and the if-necessary game.

And the public pages have been updating the whole time, so nobody is working from a screenshot of a version from Thursday.