Do team names affect Pool pairings

[spleen1015]

Integrity is an important trait to have, so as a TD myself, I blind draw all of my tournament pools and then I have to factor in scheduling requests and geography, ie teams need Saturday pools because they are coming from greater than 2 hours away, things like that.

I never build pools based on who the teams are.

www.random.org list randomizer is my friend.

 

[spleen1015]

I was reviewing tournaments last weekend trying to finalize our schedule for the summer. I noticed a team with "Elite" in their name classified as a "C" team?!?!?

This sort of things cracks me up. There is an organization close to where I live that has average to below average teams and all of their teams have Gold thrown on their names this year.

 

[Ken Krause]

Yes, it's definitely a marketing thing, trying to convince unsuspecting parents to bring their talented daughters to tryouts. I find most teams with those names don't live up to the hype.

Back to the original subject, it may not be such a bad thing to be thrown into that top pool. Sometimes TDs do that so those teams don't end up playing each other in the first round of bracket play. Gives them a chance to meet later, and to catch some unsuspecting top seed with less than its best players in the game because they're a 1 seed playing a 4.

My team got stuck in one of those pools a few years ago, although I'm pretty sure we were just there to round it out. Took some major lumps on Friday and Saturday. Come Sunday, though, we were in a good position after having played three excellent teams and improving our game. Unfortunately, the rain came and that was the end of that one.

 

[Rocketech1]

During all-star tournaments hosted by rec leagues, they always made sure their local teams would not face perennial top teams until the semi-finals or finals. Districts, state, and nationals were always blind draws. In TB, all qualifiers are blind draws. In regular tournaments, I can see where a team name might influence the TD making up the pool brackets but with so many teams here named: SoCal Firecrackers, OC Batbusters, Corona Angels, and SoCal Athletics that it takes a PhD to determine which team is which!

 

[redhotcoach]

Oh heck no! Not as much as some other things would affect it...say you multistate region's association president had a daughter that played on your team several years ago. Say said daughter was a bit below average in her athlectic abilities. Maybe said president would transfer the blame of lack of skills from said daughter to team's coaching staff. That could possibly affect pool game match ups!

 

[#7sDad]

We have 4 teams at 12U in our club. They all use Gold except us. Our coach always leaves that off our registration, lets TD's and other teams think we're not the best team in the organization since we're not Gold!

 

[#7sDad]

We're hoping to get out first tournament in next weekend. Weather's supposed be 40's-50's, but we don't care! DD was not happy to hear she can't use her new CF7.

 

[coach james]

Try renaming your team "rec league misfits" and see if you get a lighter draw....