Tabroom.com
Tabroom.com is a tournament management system used by speech and debate tournaments worldwide. Hosting and support is provided by the National Speech & Debate Association. Tabroom.com can pair individual events and debate events. It handles public pairings, enables judges to enter decisions and scores online, and publishes and tracks results all online. Tabroom.com also features a tournament calendar to display upcoming events and makes is simple to find tournaments and register your team.
Why Tabroom.com?
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- One click of a button will import your NSDA roster to your Tabroom roster, including merit number, points, email, and district eligibility status.
- Tabroom will automatically move earned NSDA competition points over to the NSDA site for coaches to confirm when a tournament is completed.
- Tabroom has built-in checks to determine whether a student may compete in districts and can alert coaches to the specific piece of information that is missing for a student to become districts eligible.
- Tournament directors have full control over what is posted and when.
- Tournament directors can post lists of advancing students only, release results piecemeal as the tournament progresses to only coaches, limit the type of results that are released throughout the tournament (win/loss to everyone and feedback to coaches only, for example).
- Tabroom allows tournament directors to send customized email and browser notifications to participants.
- Tournament directors can blast their pairing with a customized message, one section only to let them know of a drop, a particular judge who is missing, a whole event to let them know about a schedule change, all judges who have not clicked “start round”, etc.
- Tabroom supports online tournaments held synchronously using NSDA Campus or an external video conferencing site like Zoom, asynchronous tournaments, or hybrid tournaments.
- Tabroom has an auto-updating dashboard that shows whether a student/judge is present in the virtual room and whether a judge has clicked “start round”. This dashboard can read the presence of users in both the Classrooms.Cloud rooms and NSDA Campus rooms.
- Online day-of registration allows coaches of registered schools to mark themselves as present and ready to compete the day of the online tournament so that tournaments are not scrambling to determine drops day-of. This feature can also be used in place of in-person registration at a brick and mortar tournament.
- For tournaments hosting rooms on an external site (like Zoom or Classrooms.Cloud), Tabroom will automatically generate numbered rooms rather than requiring the tournament director to type and copy/paste links for hundreds of different rooms.
- Tabroom has an automated coin flip that allows users to select a side/speaking position through Tabroom and auto-updates judges’ ballots with the result of the flip.
- Competitor sign-ups allow coaches to identify a tournament their school will attend and allow students to register themselves. Coaches approve the student-entered info rather than typing piece information, contact info, and account info themselves.
- Public judge sign up allows judges with a Tabroom account to indicate to a tournament director that they would like to be hired by the tournament to judge. This has increased local community participation and made it easier for alums to reconnect to the activity.
- Hired judge exchange allows judges to indicate to schools registered for the tournament that they would like to be hired by a school to judge. Tournament directors approve an offer of hired judging, and schools registered in the tournament can hire directly from those people.
- All users can complete any action in Tabroom from their single account, including hosting a tournament, judging, and competing.
- Circuits allow leagues and geographic locations to create a Tabroom circuit where they can apply “circuit administrator” privileges to users who will be able to access and assist with any tournament on their circuit.
- Preferences and strike systems: Tabroom allows tournament directors to customize MPJ tiers, use an ordinal system, assign free strikes to a certain category, use coach ratings of judges, use tab room ratings of judges, use preferences only for elimination rounds, create strike cards, etc.
- Pairing/tiebreak settings: Tabroom allows tournament directors full control over their tiebreak settings for prelims, elims, finals, speaker awards, and sweepstakes. There are also options for customization of the speech snaking, region constraints, school constraints, and elims advancement.
- Judging: Judge obligations can be set up on a per round or per day basis, can create obligations based on entries, ranges of entries, and minimum judging, can assign a cost to limit in availability, allows coaches to assign judges to pools, allows judge double entry in multiple categories, allows coach labeling of specific groups like first year outs, and allows tournament directors to customize whether drops at a certain date count toward an obligation. Judge pools can be set up to allow blasts to specific pools, to create standby pools with specific messaging for standby judges, and can auto-fill based on schools still competing.
Tabroom.com Resources
Questions about Tabroom.com?
Check out the written instructions on how to use Tabroom.com! Use the table of contents to find what you need, or search key words in the upper right.
Speak to our staff!
Email and phone support for Tabroom.com is available Monday through Friday 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Central Time by calling (920) 748-6206 or emailing help@tabroom.com. Email support for tournament hosts and participants is available on Friday from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. CT and Saturday from 8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. CT.
Cost of Tabroom.com
Cost
The first 50 entries in a tournament are free of charge. It’s $1 per entry for every entry over the first free 50. $8/Campus room and $14/Campus with Observer room.
Fee Exemptions
NSDA district tournaments and tournaments that use NSDA Campus for an event will not pay the per-event Tabroom.com fee for that event. For example, if a tournament ran LD on NSDA Campus, LD entries would not count toward the per-entry fee.
How to Pay
Tournament directors will pay a fee based on the number of entries in their tournament before they are able to proceed with tabulation of their Tabroom.com tournament. Like NSDA Campus, use of Tabroom.com will remain unrestricted until tournament directors move on to the tabulation stage of their tournament. The payment process will be initiated in Tabroom.com similar to the NSDA Campus payment system. At any time, tournament directors can pay their per-entry fee through the automated payment process, and tabulation will be enabled immediately.
Frequently Asked Questions
When do I have to pay?
The payment process is now automated. After checking out to pay for NSDA Campus roooms or Tabroom.com usage, all features will unlock within 30 minutes. Make sure you complete purchases at least 30 minutes in advance of when you need to publish your first round. We understand that it can be hard to estimate the exact number of entries your tournament will have with late adds and drops. You can complete payment and unlock all Tabroom.com features early or immediately before your event starts. For example, a tournament director could pay for 200 entries in advance and then pay for any additional entries over that 200 when it is time to run the tournament. Alternatively, a tournament director could wait until they are ready to begin the tournament to pay, and they will be able to move ahead immediately.
Do drops count toward my per-entry cost?
No, Tabroom will only ask you to pay for the active entries in your tournament. If you anticipate drops the morning your tournament begins, you are welcome to pay that morning after drops have been processed. The payment process is automatic, and all Tabroom features will be unlocked immediately after payment. If you pay in advance of knowing the number of entries needed, there are no refunds for uncovered entries that are paid.
Can I receive a refund or credit if I paid for more entries than I needed?
No refunds or credits are available for overpayments. Since payment is automated, we encourage you to wait until you are sure of the range your entry numbers will fall in before purchasing to avoid overpayment.
How is the per-entry cost calculated?
Entry numbers are different than student numbers and can be found in your Tabroom.com tournament by going to Entries > Events. In a partner event, a two-student partnership counts as one entry. If a student is double-entered in OO and POI, that student counts as two entries. Only active entries will count toward the per-entry cost.
To calculate the cost, take the total number of entries in your tournament and subtract 50 since the first 50 entries are free. Then, subtract the number of entries that are in an event using NSDA Campus, if applicable. Multiply the remaining entries by $1 to determine your cost.
What Tabroom.com features can I use before I pay?
You can set up your tournament, adjust tournament settings, allow schools to register for your tournament, and pair rounds before Tabroom.com will prevent you from moving forward in your tournament without payment. This is intended to allow you to be comfortable with your entry numbers before paying, estimate the number of rooms you will need based on pairings in advance, and allow new users to test the software before purchasing. Any actions taken past the pairing stage of the tournament, including publishing or printing schematics, will not be possible until payment is complete.
How does the fee waiver for NSDA Campus work?
All online tournament features, including NSDA Campus, will remain available for tournaments to use. Tournaments will not be charged double to use NSDA Campus and Tabroom.com. If your tournament uses NSDA Campus rooms for an event, you will not need to pay the Tabroom.com entry cost for that event. For example, if Extemp uses NSDA Campus rooms at your tournament, Extemp entries will not count against your entry total that determines the cost of using Tabroom.com for your tournament. The cost of NSDA Campus rooms will remain the same at $8 per room per day.
Do NSDA members get a discount?
We will charge the same fee to all tournaments, regardless of membership status, to simplify the administrative, billing, and customer service impact of the change. This simplification will significantly decrease the overall cost of providing the service to everyone, especially as we continue to address legacy parts of the system unequipped to handle more complex billing. We will revisit the fee structures over time to assess the best way to ensure the system is sustainable.
Why is the NSDA charging for the use of Tabroom.com?
We are at a critical point in Tabroom.com’s serviceable lifetime. High demand has massively increased the need for customer service and system bandwidth. We know there is work to be done, and we plan to increase customer service levels to meet the needs of the thousands of tournaments that depend on us. Additionally, Tabroom.com is written in a programming language that has become obsolete, and all 400,000 lines of Tabroom.com code are currently being rewritten to ensure usability and reliability of the system. The day-to-day costs, coupled with our plans for additional investment in the future of the software, have made the long-term support of the system using general operating funds untenable. Without a change in the business model of Tabroom.com, the organization will not have the resources to guarantee future performance at a level that meets the expectations and needs of the speech and debate community. The revenue from this fee will go directly to improvements we believe are critical to Tabroom.com’s service to our community: funding new code development, increased customer support staff, and improvements in functionality and reliability of the system.
Growth of Tabroom.com
Seven years ago, the National Speech & Debate Association partnered with Chris Palmer, the founder and creator of Tabroom.com, to ensure that this budding piece of tournament software would have a future home for its development and expansion. Through ownership of Tabroom.com and employment of Chris Palmer as the lead developer, the NSDA has been able to foster significant advancements and improvements to the software, and usage has skyrocketed beyond what we imagined was possible. We are grateful to those who will continue to support the development, maintenance, and ongoing services of Tabroom.com.
Thank you for your trust that we will be good stewards of the system that so many have relied on over the past decade and a half.