We get it. You are tired of playing the same teams from the same place every weekend. You want to give your guys some new competition! You know that if you keep playing these same teams over and over, your players will lose interest and your parents may start to lose trust.
One way to fix this is to find a tournament that brings in a variety of teams from different areas and ensures that your team has the best opportunity to compete against fresh faces.
The Northwest Premier Invitational (NPI) schedule makers totally understand your situation. Teams that compete in the NPI are strategically placed in pools that will provide an awesome round-robin tournament against teams from different regions. Teams get exactly what they need in the form of new competition and revived energy to compete.
From Alaska to Utah, when Far North took on UBC in 2015, the NPI brought together two teams that are normally 3,000 miles apart and allowed them to share 94 feet.
Read on to see how we create pools for the different divisions. Then be sure to sign up for our email list that will allow us to get you up to date tournament information.
Creating the pools
The goal of the NPI is to find out who is the true tournament champion. That is why we utilize diverse pool play to seed teams in their appropriate brackets. You can think of these pools as competitive round-robin tournaments where the top seeds will get a chance to compete against the other top teams in the tournament.
The initial pool placement
Once all the tournament spots have been filled, registration closes down and the real work begins. Each age division is broken down by the number of teams, regionality and ability. If there are enough teams (typically 24 teams or more) in the division, the top 8-12 teams are identified. This usually only happens in the 17U division and occasionally in the 16U division.
In 2017, the NPI had representative teams from Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming and Canada.
The top teams will be placed in pools against each other, commonly referred to as super pools. The other teams will be separated based on where they are from, their recent history (if available) and then placed in pools as diversely as possible.
In a way, these pool play games are a round robin tournament in themselves, as your final pool seeding will determine which tournament bracket you end up in. The number of tournament brackets in each division will vary based on the number of teams but essentially the better you do in your pool play games, the higher level of bracket you end up in.
How are top teams identified?
Determining who the top teams in each division will be is not an exact science. But we have found that with some research and using our experience, we are able to do a pretty good job. It is important to note that even if your team is not identified as a top team, you will still have a chance to win your division.
Here are the four factors we consider:
- How you did in previous tournaments
- Who you have played against
- Who is on your roster
- How you performed at the NPI the year before
Some of this information won’t be available and some of this is opinion. But with over 15 years of experience, we have a pretty good idea of where teams should be placed.