Categories and groups
Categories divide the tournament into competitions that never meet. Groups divide a category into sets of teams that play each other. Almost every fairness question in a tournament is decided here.
Categories
A category is a division with its own standings and its own bracket — Boys 2013, Women's open, Mixed recreational. Create one per division you would publish a separate table for.
Manage → Categories holds category setup, age bands and competition buckets. Two operations are worth knowing:
- Split a category that turned out too large into two, distributing its teams and groups.
- Merge two categories that turned out too thin to run separately.
Both are common a week before the tournament, when registrations land differently than expected.
Groups
A group is a round-robin pool inside a category. Four teams is the usual size: it gives every team three matches, produces a readable table, and keeps the match count manageable.
FairGame distributes teams into groups for you when fixtures are generated, using the format's own strategy:
- Balanced (serpentine) spreads strength evenly — the strongest teams land in different groups, so no group is a death group.
- Stratified does the opposite on purpose: it puts similar-strength teams together, which is what the re-seeding ladder needs so that teams reach even matches quickly.
Where a system captures team strength during setup, that number seeds the distribution. If you did not provide strengths, teams are distributed evenly by count.
Moving teams between groups
Organize is the drag-and-drop board for group membership. Drag a team from one group to another and the tournament is rebalanced.
A team's fixtures belong to its group. Move a team that already has matches and those matches cannot survive — FairGame asks you to confirm before it deletes them. Regenerate the fixtures when you have finished moving teams, rather than after each move.
The safe order is: get the group membership right, then generate fixtures, then schedule. Doing it in that order means one regeneration instead of several.
Checking the draw
Tools → Fairness answers the question a coach will ask you on the Saturday: is this draw balanced? It shows team strength history, how even the groups are, and which teams look mis-rated — an entrant seeded far below the results it is actually producing.
Mis-rating is normal in youth tournaments where a club's B team is stronger than its A team. Catching it before the draw is published saves an argument; catching it afterwards at least tells you the argument is legitimate.
Reading a group
Manage → Groups is the read-only view of every group with its standings and round structure: played, won, drawn, lost, goals for and against, goal difference and points. It is the same table the public site shows, so what you see is what parents see.