Feb 18, 2021

Speed-dating with Spikeball by Sam Powick

Short King of the Hill Tournaments for New Clubs

Somewhere along the line, you woke up and realised that playing with the same three mates just isn’t enough anymore. There are crowds of people out there living without Spikeball in their lives, you thought, untapped talent just waiting to be shown the light. Congrats, you’re Spikeball’s newest prophet.

Suddenly, before you know it, you’ve got 12 people in front of you, from all walks of life, waiting for you to kick off the first meeting of your new club. Are you prepared? How do you choose teams? Can you offer these strangers the perfect mix of teamwork, comradery, and competition that they desire? Of course you can. Because you have up your sleeve the perfect mini-tournament: King of the Hill.

King of The Hill Recipe (KotH)

The idea of KotH tournaments for Spikeball is that every player gets one game on the same team as every other player, and then the individual with the highest score across all their games is the winner.

Ingredients:

• Players, preferably the hallowed multiple of four, ideal for 12 or 16 players.
• Enough Spikeball sets to feed your players
• Whiteboard or paper and pen
• Timer/Stopwatch/Any common or garden smartphone
• The Draw – I suggest Rotating Doubles Round Robin on PrintYourBrackets.com

The draws are set up so that each player plays on the same team as every other player, while facing each other player as an opponent no more than twice.

Method:

1. Visit PrintYourBrackets.com.

2. Find the draw table that corresponds to the number of players (not teams) you have. In our example we'll pretend we have just four players so our draw would look like this:

Round	1	2	3
Match Up	1 + 2 vs 3 + 4	2 + 4 vs 1 + 3	1 + 4 vs 2 + 3

3. Number off the players. In our case that is 1-4, so that they can find their games in the draw.

4. Using your whiteboard, draw a grid that looks like this:

Player Number	Player Name	Points Won in Game 1	Points Won in Game 2	Points Won in Game 3	Points Won in Game 4
1	African Swallow	7
2	Tim	7
3	Knight of Ni	2
4	Benny	2

5. Play! Using the numbers assigned to each player, get them to look at the draw (from step 2) and meet their first teammate!

6. Set a timer to limit the round length.

a. Game length depends on how much time you have. Typically, games to between 7 and 11 points work best. The idea is to make sure every player gets to play on a team with every other player, so if you must make games very short to do this, then it’s worth it.

b. For example, if you have 2 hours and 12 players, you need to fit 11 games into 120 minutes (just over ten mins a game).

7. After each game, each player writes their team's score in their name’s row on the whiteboard, in the Game # column. So if African Swallow & Tim won the first round and games were to 7 points they would both be awarded 7 points. Knight of Ni and Benny sadly only received 2 points so they would each receive a score of 2.

8. Once the time for the round is up, each player checks the draw for their next matchup and teammate, etc.

9. Once all games have been played, tally up each player’s row on the whiteboard. Whoever has the most total points across all their games is the King of the Hill!