Customise your finals?
Want to know how to customise the finals for your competition? This is a quick tutorial to set you off in the right direction and explain some of the options that TheBench makes available for you when it come to the finals.
Change the number of participating Clubs
By default, finals always run in the final 4 rounds of the standard home and away season.
The most simple level of customisation, lets you choose the number of Clubs that will participate in the finals. As the Competition Manager you can choose any of a 2, 4, 5, 6 or 8 club finals series. You can change this at any time before the finals start.
To change the finals model, just go to the Competition Manage page and change the “Finals Model” value as needed.
By default, the system will set you up as “Automatic” which means it will automatically select the number of Clubs in the finals based on the total number of Club in your Competition, e.g. if you have 10 Clubs it will automatically set you up for a 5 Club finals series.
With the number of Clubs who will participate in the finals selected, the System will automatically setup your finals games as each finals round progresses. If you are wondering how the games will get defined, based on the number of participating Clubs, you can checkout one of the help pages here.
Bespoke finals
So what about if you want to run finals in the last 2 round of the season? Or perhaps you don’t like the way we setup the games in a 5 Club finals series.
Well, the good news is TheBench lets you customise the finals right down to individual games.
On the Competition Edit page, if you simply select the Finals Model “None/Custom”, the System effectively hands the keys over to you to setup the Finals to your liking.
In this mode, no finals games will be automatically created. Instead, you will need to manually create the games as you see fit.
To create your custom finals games, from the Fixture tab, select “Edit Games” on the round in question. This will take you to the Game Edit page where you can add, delete and edit games. Just keep in mind that you will only be able to edit the games once the previous round has been finalised.
With this model, you will need to manually create the games each week and will need to manually decide who plays who based on your finals results.
So if you want to run finals in the last two weeks, continuing the home and away games for another two weeks, for example, you just manually create a set of standard games when everyone participates for the first two weeks and then manually create the finals games, in any format you like, for the remaining two.
Battle to the Bottom (Sacko)
Another options is to create an additional set of games through the finals rounds, for the bottom teams to battle it out. Sacko style for any fans of “The League”.
This option is available even for all Finals Models so you can have the System automatically create your normal finals but you can then add in an extra set of bottom feeder finals.
Game Builder Wizard
OK, so you have read up on customising your finals and have decided to give it a go. Lets say you want to run your finals series one week earlier than the standard final 4 rounds.
But who can be shagged with manually calculating who plays who and manually keying in all those games…? Well not us, and we assume not you either so we have built a tool to help called the “Game Builder Wizard”.
Assuming you have already set your Finals Model to be “None/Custom”, you can go to the Fixture page and click “Edit” on the round you want to setup the first round of your finals.
The first thing you will want to do is delete an least one of any existing games. Deleting the first will enable the link to the ”Game Builder Wizard”. Click on the link and the system will open up a page to help you automatically create the finals games.
The wizard will give you two criteria to pick from:
Game Style: this is the style or format of the games that are to be created. e.g. to setup the games for Round 1 or a finals series, choose “Finals Round 1″. Similarly, next week for a second round of finals, you would choose “Finals Round 2″.
Participating Clubs: this option lets you choose the number of clubs you want to be involved. If you are running a finals series with the top 5 clubs in your 12 club competition for example, choose 5.
The system will show you a preview of the proposed games on the right. If you are happy with the games, just hit Save and the games will be locked in. You can even then go back in to the Fixture edit page and tweek the games further or even add some extra games for the bottom rankers.
The Game Builder Wizard will always try to merge any existing games but we aware that the Game Builder Wizard will delete any games featuring the Clubs that it cares about. You will see the warning on the screen if this happens.
Another thing to remember is that you need to wait for a round to complete (ie. all the real games have been played) before setting up the next round. This is because for finals games, the Wizard will use the results from the previous round to determine who plays who in the next.
Other than that, you should be good to go.
Good luck!
JB
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